A Hybrid Reconfigurable Architecture and Design Methods Aiming at Control-Intensive Kernels

With the development of parallel computing, the compute-intensive part of an application could be accelerated so dramatically that the control intensive part, usually processed by a sequential processor, is becoming more and more critical in terms of performance and power consumption. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel reconfigurable architecture to execute control-intensive kernels efficiently. The architecture applies three key design methods. The first one, parallel condition, exploits the instruction level parallelism of conditional branches with hardware design. The second one, configuration branch, enables the architecture to independently execute an entire application that has loops and other control flows. The third one, compound configuration, combines multiple configurations of low hardware utilization, which are common in sequential codes particularly, and thus reduces the reconfiguring times. Therefore, to offload control-intensive kernels onto the proposed architecture will speed up these workloads and boost the overall performance. The experiments were conducted on a benchmark that contains various branches, loops, and sequential codes. The results showed that the proposed architecture alone could implement the benchmark correctly. In addition, the proposed methods can improve performance by over 40% compared with the conventional techniques. The power efficiency is two orders larger than general purpose processors.