Dynamo: A Runtime Codesign Environment

摘要

Systems using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) boards have been proven effective for gaining one to three orders of magnitude speed-up over systems based solely on PCs. Signal and image processing applications are especially attractive for implementation on FPGAs as their computationally intensive and massively parallel algorithms can effectively take advantage of the FPGA architecture. In moving part of an algorithm to hardware, one must consider overhead costs as well as the improvement in the computation to determine whether the move will result in overall system speed-up. Dynamo is a runtime system for generating hardware/software pipeline implementations. Dynamo balances the benefits of hardware and software implementations and takes overhead costs into account in order to accurately predict runtimes of hardware/software systems.