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Summary: SHARED RECONFIGURABLE ARCHITECTURES FOR CMPS
Matthew A. Watkins, Mark J. Cianchetti, and David H. Albonesi
Computer Systems Laboratory
Cornell University
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates reconfigurable architectures suit-
able for chip multiprocessors (CMPs). Prior research has
established that augmenting a conventional processor with
reconfigurable logic can dramatically improve the perfor-
mance of certain application classes, but this comes at non-
trivial power and area costs. Given substantial observed
time and space differences in fabric usage, we propose that
pools of programmable logic should be shared among mul-
tiple cores. While a common shared pool is more compact
and power efficient, fabric conflicts may lead to large per-
formance losses relative to per-core private fabrics.
We identify particular characteristics of past reconfig-
urable fabric designs that are particularly amenable to fabric
sharing. We then propose spatially and temporally shared
fabrics in a CMP. The sharing policies that we devise in-
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