1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to adapting a high-level language program to operate in a hybrid reconfigurable hardware-instruction processor computing environment. More specifically, the invention relates to converting a high level language program into a unified executable that can run on a hybrid reconfigurable hardware-instruction processor computer.
2. Background
As instruction processors continue to increase rapidly in processing power, they are used more often to do computationally intensive calculations that were once exclusively done by supercomputers. However, there are still computationally intensive tasks, including, for example, compute-intensive image processing and hydrodynamic simulations that remain impractical to do on modem instruction processors.
Reconfigurable computing is a technology receiving increased interest in the computing arts. Traditional general purpose computing is characterized by computer code executed serially on one or more general purpose processors. Reconfigurable computing is characterized by programming reconfigurable hardware, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to execute logic routines.
Reconfigurable computing offers significant performance advances in computation-intensive processing. For example, the reconfigurable hardware may be programmed with a logic configuration that has more parallelism and pipelining characteristics than a conventional instruction processor. Also, the reconfigurable hardware may be programmed with a custom logic configuration that is very efficient for executing the tasks assigned by the program. Furthermore, dividing a program's processing requirements between the instruction processor and the reconfigurable hardware may increase the overall processing power of the computer.
Hybrid computing platforms have been developed that include both general-purpose processor(s) and reconfigurable hardware. An exemplary hybrid-computing platform is the SRC-6E commercially available from SRC Computers, Inc., in Colorado Springs, Colo., USA. The SRC-6E system architecture includes multiple general-purpose instruction processors executing a standard operating system, e.g., Linux. Attached to the general-purpose instruction processors are specially configured Multi-Adaptive Processors (MAPs).
Unfortunately, an important stumbling block for users who may wish to use reconfigurable computing is the difficulty of programming the reconfigurable hardware. Conventional methods of programming reconfigurable hardware included the use of hardware description languages (HDLs); low-level languages that require digital circuit expertise as well as explicit handling of timing. Thus, there remains a need for processes that can take a program written in a high level language and convert it into code that can be executed on a hybrid reconfigurable hardware-instruction processor computer with minimal modifications to the original program.