Sunday, May 14, 2006

virtual hardware target

In order to maintain target independence, I'm building circuit fabrics in Scheme using the digital circuit simulator as outlined in SICP (section 3.3.4).

I will eventually want to run "virtual" fabrics on my current reconfigurable computing setup so that I can use the virtual fabric to test the scheduling algorithm. I will end up simulating more complex fabrics and with functional multiplexing and better routing options.

I've been thinking about recursively defined hierarchical fabric structures may be interesting substrates for reconfigurable computing. For example we can construct an order M computing node where nodes of order n consist of 4 other nodes of order n-1, an order n datapath, a controller and a 2^n sized memory block. an order n datapath contains n-stage pipeline of reconfigurable units. the controller manages the flowware of the node and moves data from the memory. an order 0 node contains no children or datapath and just consists the memory as a buffer to the output. This was a pretty loose spec, but the idea of recursive structures seems like a good idea especially as an abstraction for defining and dealing with complex heterogenous structures.

1 comment:

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