Home → Magazine Archive → December 2013 (Vol. 56, No. 12) → December 2013 (Vol. 56, No. 12) → Abstract

And Then There Were None: A Stall-Free Real-Time Garbage Collector For Reconfigurable Hardware

By David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, Sunil Shukla

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 56 No. 12, Pages 101-109
10.1145/2534706.2534726

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The end of frequency scaling has driven architects and developers to parallelism in search of performance. However, general-purpose MIMD parallelism can be inefficient and power-hungry, with power rapidly becoming the limiting factor. This has led the search for performance to non-traditional chip architectures like GPUs and other more radical architectures. The most radical computing platform of all is reconfigurable hardware, in the form of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).

FPGAs are now available with over one million programmable logic cells and 8MB of on-chip "Block RAM," providing a massive amount of bit-level parallelism combined with single-cycle access to on-chip memory. Furthermore, because that memory is distributed over the chip in distinct 36Kb units, the potential internal bandwidth is very high.

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