Advantages in Information Technology continue to play a vital role in our nation's ability to innovate and compete in theglobal market. Advancements in computing performance, especially in the embedded computing systems domain, are enabling these advantages. This project combines commercially available, hybrid devices (that is, single integrated circuits with processors, memory, and configurable hardware) and a novel run-time system with the goal of building systems with better performance and fewer resources. To accomplish this, the project is investigating and developing technology in two steps. First, every subroutine in the embedded systems application is processed to find those suitable for acceleration by configurable hardware and a new hardware feature is synthesized. Then, as the application executes, the run-time system continually reconfigures the hardware to keep the most profitable features resident. By carefully managing the overhead introduced, the aim of this work is to provide the performance advantages of custom hardware with fewer physical resources. The advantage of the particular system under investigation is that it automates reconfiguration -- which presently is an engineering-intensive, manual process. To test the effectiveness of this approach, the University of Kansas has teamed with Grand Valley State University to judge the performance of the system on applications developed by senior undergraduate students.
