MobileFBP: Designing portable reconfigurable applications for heterogeneous systems

Power-efficiency has been a key issue for today’s application and system design, ranging from embedded systems to data centers. While application-specific designs and optimizations may improve the power efficiency, it requires significant efforts to co-design the hardware and software, which are difficult to re-use. On the hardware front, the trend of heterogeneous computing enables custom designs for specific applications by integrating different types of processors and reconfigurable hardware to handle compute-intensive tasks. However, what is still missing is an elegant application framework, i.e., a programming environment and a runtime system, to develop portable applications which can offload tasks or be reconfigured dynamically to run on a variety of systems efficiently. Our ongoing work, MobileFBP, provides an application framework which aims to support heterogeneous and reconfigurable systems. Using the framework, the developers build portable applications with a dataflow programming paradigm, and the MobileFBP runtime system dynamically schedules the task components to run on available computing resources locally or remotely based on the application profiles. We hope that this ability produces high-level portable applications and reduces the efforts and skills needed for the developers to optimize their applications on a range of systems. This paper describes this work and presents our preliminary results.