For applications such as live video processing, there is a high demand for high performance and low latency solutions. The configurable logic in FPGAs allows for custom hardware to be tailored to a specific video application. These FPGA designs require technical expertise and lengthy implementation times by vendor tools for each unique solution. This thesis presents a dynamically configurable topology as an FPGA overlay to deploy custom hardware processing pipelines during run-time by utilizing dynamic partial reconfiguration. Within the FPGA overlay, a configurable topology with a routable switch allows video streams to be copied and mixed to create complex data paths. This work demonstrates a dynamic video processing pipeline with 11 reconfigurable regions and 16 unique processing cores, allowing for billions of custom run-time configurations.

The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a dynamically reconfigurable digital logic chip used to implement custom hardware. The large densities of modern FPGAs and the capability of the on-thely reconfiguration has made the FPGA a viable alternative to fixed logic hardware chips such as the ASIC. In high-performance computing, FPGAs are used as co-processors to speed up computationally intensive processes or as autonomous systems that realize a complete hardware application. However, due to the limited capacity of FPGA logic resources, denser FPGAs must be purchased if more logic resources are required to realize all the functions of a complex application. Alternatively, partial reconfiguration (PR) can be used to swap, on demand, idle components of the application with active components. This research uses PR to swap components to improve the performance of the application given the limited logic resources available with smaller but economical FPGAs. The swap is called ”resource sharing PR”. In a pipelined design of multiple hardware modules (pipeline stages), resource sharing PR is a technique that uses PR to improve the performance of pipeline bottlenecks. This is done by reconfiguring other pipeline stages, typically those that are idle waiting for data from a bottleneck, into an additional parallel bottleneck module. The target pipeline of this research is a two-stage “slow-toast” pipeline where the flow of data traversing the pipeline transitions from a relatively slow, bottleneck stage to a fast stage. A two stage pipeline that combines FPGA-based hardware implementations of well-known Bioinformatics search algorithms, the X! Tandem algorithm and the Smith-Waterman algorithm, is implemented for this research; the implemented pipeline demonstrates that characteristics of these algorithm. The experimental results show that, in a database of unknown peptide spectra, when matching spectra with 388 peaks or greater, performing resource sharing PR to instantiate a parallel X! Tandem module is worth the cost for PR. In addition, from timings gathered during experiments, a general formula was derived for determining the value of performing PR upon a fast module.

No description available.

Design validation is the most time-consuming task in the FPGA design cycle. Although manufacturers and third-party vendors offer a range of tools that provide different perspectives of a design, many require that the design be fully re-implemented for even simple parameter modifications or do not allow the design to be run at full speed. Designs are typically first modeled using a high-level language then later rewritten in a hardware description language, first for simulation and then later modified for synthesis. IP and third-party cores may differ during these final two stages complicating development and validation. The developed approach provides two means of directly validating synthesized hardware designs. The first allows the original high-level model written in C or C++ to be directly coupled to the synthesized hardware, abstracting away the traditional gate-level view of designs. A high-level programmatic interface allows the synthesized design to be validated with the same arbitrary test data on the same framework as the hardware. The second approach provides an alternative view to FPGAs within the scope of a traditional software debugger. This debug framework leverages partially reconfigurable regions to accelerate the modification of dynamic, software-like breakpoints for low-level analysis and provides a automatable, scriptable, command-line interface directly to a running design on an FPGA. / Ph. D.

Modern Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can implement entire run-time reconfigurable systems using partial reconfiguration. Module-based run-time reconfiguration permits the construction of custom applications at run-time using pre-compiled Intellectual Property (IP) from a module library. The need for both flexible module placement and custom inter-module communication is mostly ignored by existing modular run-time reconfiguration approaches and few existing tool flows for module generation address the need for automation. This thesis introduces an automated compile-time tool flow for generating dynamic modules that allow flexible run-time placement and communication synthesis. / Master of Science

Pour supporter l’évolution constante des standards de communication numérique, du GSM vers la 5G, les équipements de communication doivent continuellement s’adapter. Face à l’utilisation croissante de l’internet, on assiste à une explosion du trafic de données, ce qui augmente la consommation d'énergie des appareils de communication sans fil et conduit donc à un impact significatif sur les émissions mondiales de CO2. De plus en plus de recherches se sont concentrées sur l'efficacité énergétique de la communication sans fil. La radio Intelligente, ou Cognitive Radio (CR), est considérée comme une technologie pertinente pour les communications radio vertes en raison de sa capacité à adapter son comportement à son environnement. Sur la base de métriques fournissant suffisamment d'informations sur l'état de fonctionnement du système, une décision optimale peut être effectuée en vue d'une action de reconfiguration, dans le but de réduire au minimum la dissipation d'énergie tout en ne compromettant pas les performances. Par conséquent, tout équipement intelligent doit disposer d’une architecture de gestion de la reconfiguration. Nous avons retenu l’architecture HDCRAM (Hierarchical and Distributed Cognitive Radio Architecture Management), développée dans notre équipe, et nous l’avons déployée sur des plates-formes hétérogènes. L'un des objectifs est d'améliorer l'efficacité énergétique par la mise en œuvre de l’architecture HDCRAM. Nous l’avons appliquée à un système OFDM simplifié pour illustrer comment HDCRAM permet de gérer efficacement le système et son adaptation à un environnement évolutif. / As the digital communication systems evolve from GSM and now toward 5G, the supported standards are also growing. The desired communication equipments are required to support different standards in a single device at the same time. And more and more wireless Internet services have been being provided resulting in the explosive growth in data traffic, which increase the energy consumption of the communication devices thus leads to significant impact on global CO2 emission. More and more researches have focused on the energy efficiency of wireless communication. Cognitive Radio (CR) has been considered as an enabling technology for green radio communications due to its ability to adapt its behavior to the changing environment. In order to efficiently manage the sensing information and the reconfiguration of a cognitive equipment, it is essential, first of all, to gather the necessary metrics so as to provide enough information about the operating condition thus helping decision making. Then, on the basis of the metrics obtained, an optimal decision can be made and is followed by a reconfiguration action, whose aim is to minimize the power dissipation while not compromising on performance. Therefore, a management architecture is necessary to be added into the cognitive equipment acting as a glue to realize the CR capabilities. We introduce a management architecture, namely Hierarchical and Distributed Cognitive Radio Architecture Management (HDCRAM), which has been proposed for CR management by our team. This work focuses on the implementation of HDCRAM on heterogeneous platforms. One of the objectives is to improve the energy efficiency by the management of HDCRAM. And an example of a simplified OFDM system is used to explain how HDCRAM works to efficiently manage the system to adapt to the changing environment.

Nos últimos anos, houve um grande avanço na computação reconfigurável, em particular em hardware que emprega Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. Porém, esse aumento de capacidade e desempenho aumentou a distância entre a capacidade de projeto e a disponibilidade de tecnologia para o desenvolvimento do projeto. As linguagens de programação imperativas de alto nível, como C, são mais apropriadas para o desenvolvimento de aplicativos complexos que as linguagens de descrição de hardware. Por isso, surgiram diversas ferramentas para o desenvolvimento de hardware a partir de código em C. A ferramenta ChipCflow, da qual faz parte este projeto, é uma delas. A execução dos programas por meio dessa ferramenta será completamente baseada em seu fluxo de dados, seguindo o modelo dinâmico encontrado nas arquiteturas de computadores a fluxo de dados, aproveitando ao máximo o paralelismo considerado natural desse modelo e as características do hardware parcialmente reconfigurável. Neste projeto em particular, o objetivo é a prova de conceito (proof of concept) para a criação de instâncias, em forma de operadores, de um algoritmo ChipCflow em hardware parcialmente reconfigurável, tendo como base a plataforma Virtex da Xilinx / In recent years, reconfigurable computing has become increasingly more advanced, especially in hardware that uses Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. However, the increase of performance in FPGAs accumulated the gap between design capacity and technology for the development of the design. Imperative high-level programming languages such as C are more appropriate for the development of complex algorithms than hardware description languages (HDL). For this reason, many ANSI C-like programming tools for the development of hardware came to existence. The ChipCflow project, of which this project is part, is one of these tools. The execution of algorithms through this tool will be completely directed by data flow, according to the dynamic model found on Dataflow Architectures, taking advantage of its natural high levels of parallelism and the characteristics of the partially reconfigurable hardware. In this project, the objective is a proof of concept for the creation of instances, in the form of operators, of a ChipCflow algorithm on a partially reconfigurable hardware, taking as reference the Xilinx Virtex boards

La principale contribution de cette thèse porte sur la proposition et le développement d'une approche d'Ingénierie Dirigée par les Modèles (IDM), liée à une méthodologie basée sur des composants, pour faciliter la conception, design et implantation des Systèmes Dynamiquement Reconfigurables sur puce (FPGA). La méthodologie proposée repose sur l'utilisation du paradigme Metadata-based Composition Framework, et fortement basée sur des standards, tels qu'UML MARTE et, en particulier, l'IEEE IP-XACT, qui est exploitée comme représentation intermédiaire pour les IPs utilisés et pour la plateforme matérielle composée aux hautes-niveaux d'abstraction. Un procès d'emballage permet la réutilisation des bloques IP, qui ont été enveloppés par des interfaces PLB (IP statiques) et propriétaires (IP dynamiques). Subséquemment, la libraire est utilisée pour la composition d'un modèle de plateforme en UML, mais qui étant générative, permet la création d'une description cible de la composante matérielle de la plateforme, dans la forme d'un modèle spécifique à Xilinx Platform Studio, obtenu par des transformations des modèles. Les chaines de transformations pour la création de la libraire et de la plateforme, respectivement, ont été développées et implantées en utilisant Sodius MDWorkbench, un outil IDM conçu pour la création et manipulation des modèles et leur méta - modèles, ainsi que la définition et exécution des transformations des modèles associées / The main contribution of this thesis consists on the proposition and development a Model-driven Engineering (MDE) framework, in tandem with a component-based approach, for facilitating the design and implementation of Dynamic Partially Reconfigurable (DPR) Systems-on-Chip. The proposed methodology has been constructed around the Metadata-based Composition Framework paradigm, and based on common standards such as UML MARTE and the IEEE IP-XACT standard, an XML representation used for storing metadata about the IPs to be reused and of the platforms to be obtained at high-levels of abstraction. In fact, a componentizing process enables us to reuse the IP blocks, in UML MARTE, by wrapping them with PLB (static IPs) and proprietary (DPR blocks) interfaces. This is attained by reflecting the associated IP metadata to IP-XACT descriptions, and then to UML MARTE templates (IP reuse). Subsequently, these IP templates are used for composing a DPR model that can be exploited to create a Xilinx Platform Studio FPGA-design, through model transformations. The IP reflection and system generation chains were developed using Sodius MDWorkbench, an MDE tool conceived for the creation and manipulation of models and their meta-models, as well as the definition and execution of the associated transformation rules.

Pour supporter l’évolution constante des standards de communication numérique, du GSM vers la 5G, les équipements de communication doivent continuellement s’adapter. Face à l’utilisation croissante de l’internet, on assiste à une explosion du trafic de données, ce qui augmente la consommation d'énergie des appareils de communication sans fil et conduit donc à un impact significatif sur les émissions mondiales de CO2. De plus en plus de recherches se sont concentrées sur l'efficacité énergétique de la communication sans fil. La radio Intelligente, ou Cognitive Radio (CR), est considérée comme une technologie pertinente pour les communications radio vertes en raison de sa capacité à adapter son comportement à son environnement. Sur la base de métriques fournissant suffisamment d'informations sur l'état de fonctionnement du système, une décision optimale peut être effectuée en vue d'une action de reconfiguration, dans le but de réduire au minimum la dissipation d'énergie tout en ne compromettant pas les performances. Par conséquent, tout équipement intelligent doit disposer d’une architecture de gestion de la reconfiguration. Nous avons retenu l’architecture HDCRAM (Hierarchical and Distributed Cognitive Radio Architecture Management), développée dans notre équipe, et nous l’avons déployée sur des plates-formes hétérogènes. L'un des objectifs est d'améliorer l'efficacité énergétique par la mise en œuvre de l’architecture HDCRAM. Nous l’avons appliquée à un système OFDM simplifié pour illustrer comment HDCRAM permet de gérer efficacement le système et son adaptation à un environnement évolutif. / As the digital communication systems evolve from GSM and now toward 5G, the supported standards are also growing. The desired communication equipments are required to support different standards in a single device at the same time. And more and more wireless Internet services have been being provided resulting in the explosive growth in data traffic, which increase the energy consumption of the communication devices thus leads to significant impact on global CO2 emission. More and more researches have focused on the energy efficiency of wireless communication. Cognitive Radio (CR) has been considered as an enabling technology for green radio communications due to its ability to adapt its behavior to the changing environment. In order to efficiently manage the sensing information and the reconfiguration of a cognitive equipment, it is essential, first of all, to gather the necessary metrics so as to provide enough information about the operating condition thus helping decision making. Then, on the basis of the metrics obtained, an optimal decision can be made and is followed by a reconfiguration action, whose aim is to minimize the power dissipation while not compromising on performance. Therefore, a management architecture is necessary to be added into the cognitive equipment acting as a glue to realize the CR capabilities. We introduce a management architecture, namely Hierarchical and Distributed Cognitive Radio Architecture Management (HDCRAM), which has been proposed for CR management by our team. This work focuses on the implementation of HDCRAM on heterogeneous platforms. One of the objectives is to improve the energy efficiency by the management of HDCRAM. And an example of a simplified OFDM system is used to explain how HDCRAM works to efficiently manage the system to adapt to the changing environment.

Nos últimos anos, houve um grande avanço na computação reconfigurável, em particular em hardware que emprega Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. Porém, esse aumento de capacidade e desempenho aumentou a distância entre a capacidade de projeto e a disponibilidade de tecnologia para o desenvolvimento do projeto. As linguagens de programação imperativas de alto nível, como C, são mais apropriadas para o desenvolvimento de aplicativos complexos que as linguagens de descrição de hardware. Por isso, surgiram diversas ferramentas para o desenvolvimento de hardware a partir de código em C. A ferramenta ChipCflow, da qual faz parte este projeto, é uma delas. A execução dos programas por meio dessa ferramenta será completamente baseada em seu fluxo de dados, seguindo o modelo dinâmico encontrado nas arquiteturas de computadores a fluxo de dados, aproveitando ao máximo o paralelismo considerado natural desse modelo e as características do hardware parcialmente reconfigurável. Neste projeto em particular, o objetivo é a prova de conceito (proof of concept) para a criação de instâncias, em forma de operadores, de um algoritmo ChipCflow em hardware parcialmente reconfigurável, tendo como base a plataforma Virtex da Xilinx / In recent years, reconfigurable computing has become increasingly more advanced, especially in hardware that uses Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. However, the increase of performance in FPGAs accumulated the gap between design capacity and technology for the development of the design. Imperative high-level programming languages such as C are more appropriate for the development of complex algorithms than hardware description languages (HDL). For this reason, many ANSI C-like programming tools for the development of hardware came to existence. The ChipCflow project, of which this project is part, is one of these tools. The execution of algorithms through this tool will be completely directed by data flow, according to the dynamic model found on Dataflow Architectures, taking advantage of its natural high levels of parallelism and the characteristics of the partially reconfigurable hardware. In this project, the objective is a proof of concept for the creation of instances, in the form of operators, of a ChipCflow algorithm on a partially reconfigurable hardware, taking as reference the Xilinx Virtex boards