Portable library development for reconfigurable computing systems: A case study

Portable libraries of highly-optimized hardware cores can significantly reduce the development time of reconfigurable computing applications. This paper presents the tradeoffs and challenges in the design of such libraries. A set of library development guidelines is provided, which has been validated with the RCLib case study. RCLib is a set of portable libraries with over 100 cores, targeting a wide range of applications. RCLib portability has been verified in three major High-Performance reconfigurable computing architectures: SRC6, Cray XD1 and SGI RC100. Compared to full-software implementations, applications using RCLib hardware acceleration cores show speedups ranging from one to four orders of magnitude.