Elastic superposition task mapping for NoC-based reconfigurable systems

With technology progress, more and more applications are integrated into a single chip. This requires a large number of processing elements (PEs) in a system, such that computation can be effectively enhanced through parallel processing. To support more efficient parallel processing, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) is being increasingly adopted as an interconnection architecture. Nevertheless, for NoC-based reconfigurable systems, the issue of mapping tasks to the PEs becomes more complex, due to the characteristic of hardware reconfiguration. This work proposes a novel Elastic Superposition Mapping (ESM) that introduces a useful PE reservation heuristic along with dynamic cross-application superposition. The ESM can provide a great elasticity for an NoC-based reconfigurable system to map more applications. Thus, the task load on PE will increase. Experiments show that, compared to the state-of-the-art mapping methods, 7% to 49% more applications can be executed, the average task load on PE can be increased by 5.5% to 56%, and the application waiting time can be reduced by 11% to 54%.