Optimal Free-Space Management and Routing-Conscious Dynamic Placement for Reconfigurable Devices

TL;DR

This paper presents efficient algorithms for managing free space and placement in reconfigurable hardware devices, significantly improving over previous methods in speed and practicality.

Contribution

It introduces novel geometric algorithms for optimal free-space maintenance and communication-aware placement with improved computational complexity.

Findings

Algorithms run in Theta(n log n) time

Methods are practically easy to implement

Experimental results show convincing performance

Abstract

We describe algorithmic results for two crucial aspects of allocating resources on computational hardware devices with partial reconfigurability. By using methods from the field of computational geometry, we derive a method that allows correct maintainance of free and occupied space of a set of n rectangular modules in optimal time Theta(n log n); previous approaches needed a time of O(n^2) for correct results and O(n) for heuristic results. We also show that finding an optimal feasible communication-conscious placement (which minimizes the total weighted Manhattan distance between the new module and existing demand points) can be computed in Theta(n log n). Both resulting algorithms are practically easy to implement and show convincing experimental behavior.