Implementation of Data Driven Applications on a Multi-Context Reconfigurable Device

WASMII is a virtual hardware system that executes dataflow algorithms using a dynamically reconfigurable multi-context device with a data driven control mechanism. Although the effectiveness of the system has been evaluated through simulations and using an emulator, implementation of WASMII was infeasible due to the unavailability of such a device. However, the first prototype of a practical dynamically reconfigurable multi-context device called DRL has been developed by NEC, and we developed a reconfigurable test bed using four sample DRL chips. On this board, we have implemented and executed some simple applications of WASMII mechanism. Evaluation results show that the performance of the parallel implementation of WASMII is almost twice as that of a PC with a CPU based on the corresponding technology.