The ability of reconfigurable applications to dynamically adapt to internal and external changes offers several benefits from both system and user perspectives. These benefits include better system and application performance, better load balance, fault tolerance, and adaptability to changes in the external environment. This paper focuses on the design, development, and execution of reconfigurable data-parallel applications, a particular class of reconfigurable applications, in the context of time-variant system resources. We first characterize reconfigurable parallel applications. We then present the SOP programming model and DRMS, an integrated environment for design, development, execution, and resource scheduling for these applications. We contrast DRMS with other reconfiguration approaches. Experiments were conducted to verify the functionality and performance of application reconfiguration under DRMS. The detailed breakdown of the costs in reconfiguration are presented with respect to several different applications. The results show that application reconfiguration is effective under DRMS and identify areas for further optimization.
By: José E. Moreira, Vijay K. Naik and Ravi B. Konuru
Published in: RC20455 in 1996
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