Software Architecture for Morphing in Polymorphous Computing Architectures

摘要

To exploit the capabilities of PCA hardware while retaining as much end-user portability and performance as possible, the Morphware Forum (www.morphware.org), an informal consortium of PCA contractors and other selected participants, is creating an application development framework, called the Morphware Stable Interface (MSI). A key capability envisioned for PCA systems is morphing, the reconfiguration and re-allocation of PCA hardware resources within a chip in response to various events. Morphing is fundamentally enabled by the reconfigurable hardware microarchitecture of PCA chips, but is made accessible to the programming environment through the MSI. Thus, a major software design issue for the PCA program is how to structure the MSI so as to support morphing while maintaining portability across the various PCA targets.