The ability to reconfigure an FPGA-based custom computing machine so rapidly that alteration at run-time is feasible provides opportunities for new applications and levels of performance. In this paper we indicate how FPGA technology can be exploited beyond mere hardware reapplication, and illustrate this in relation to the SPACE custom computing platform. We describe a fully pipelined free-text search machine architecture for scoring the relevance of textual documents against approximately 100 relevant target words, with provision for limited regular expression matching. An implementation on Algotronix FPGAs indicates that throughput in the order of 20 megabytes per second is achievable if a locally synchronous design style is adopted and global communications minimized. Partial reconfiguration of the datapath at run-time eliminates unnecessary data transfers and improves the utilisation of the FPGA hardware.
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