UPDATING HARDWARE LIBRARIES FOR USE BY APPLICATIONS ON A COMPUTER SYSTEM WITH AN FPGA COPROCESSOR

摘要

A computer system includes one or more field programmable gate arrays as a coprocessor that can be shared among processes and programmed using hardware libraries. Given a set of hardware libraries, an update process periodically updates the libraries and/or adds new libraries. One or more update servers can provide information about libraries available for download, either in response to a request or by notifying systems using such libraries. New available libraries can be presented to a user for selection and download. Requests for updated libraries can arise in several ways, such as through polling for updates, exceptions from applications attempting to use libraries, and upon compilation of application code.