Applications of Heterogeneous Computing in Hardware/Software Co-Scheduling

Current work on automatic task partitioning and scheduling for reconfigurable computing (RC) systems strictly addresses the field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware, and does not take advantage of the synergy between the microprocessor and the FPGA. Efforts on partitioning between the microprocessor and the FPGA are often times a manual and laborious effort as a formal methodology for automatic hardware-software partitioning for RC systems has not yet been established. Related fields such as heterogeneous computing (HC) and embedded computing (EC) have an extensive body of work for scheduling for heterogeneous processors. In this work, we adapt HC scheduling algorithms for RC systems, and show how simply adapting the algorithms alone is not sufficient to take advantage of the reconfigurable hardware. In many cases, the HC heuristics algorithms do not generate efficient schedules necessary to take advantage of the synergy between the microprocessor and the FPGA. We introduce new heuristic algorithms based on HC scheduling algorithms and show that they provide up to an order of magnitude improvement in execution time.