Diastolic arrays : throughput-driven reconfigurable computing

In this thesis, we propose a new reconfigurable computer substrate: diastolic arrays. Diastolic arrays are arrays of processing elements that communicate exclusively through First-In First-Out (FIFO) queues, and provide hardware support to guarantee bandwidth and buffer space for all data transfers. FIFO control implies that a module idles if its input FIFOs are empty, and stalls if its output FIFOs are full. The timing of data transfers between processing elements in diastolic arrays is therefore significantly more relaxed than in systolic arrays or pipelines. All specified data transfers are statically routed, and the routing problem to maximize average throughput can be optimally or near-optimally solved in polynomial time by formulating it as a maximum concurrent multicommodity flow problem and using linear programming. We show that the architecture of diastolic arrays enables efficient synthesis from high-level specifications of communicating finite state machines, providing a high-performance, off-the-shelf computer substrate that can be easily programmed.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Cho, Myong Hyon, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Srinivas Devadas.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44378

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44378