Extra: An Open Platform For Reconfigurable Architectures

Reconfigurable hardware is becoming increasingly mainstream, evolving to a valid alternative to Graphics Processing Units-based hardware accelerators. However, several major challenges remain for migrating existing software to heterogeneous reconfigurable architectures. The EXTRA project aims to develop an integrated environment for developing and programming reconfigurable architectures. The EXTRA platform enables the joint optimization of architecture, tools, and reconfiguration technology, and targets the future High Performance Computing hardware nodes. In this paper, we present four innovative EXTRA technologies: (1) a hardwares-software co-design framework; (2) a parallel memory system; (3) a decoupled access execute framework for reconfigurable technology; and (4) transparent access and virtualization of reconfigurable hardware accelerators. Moreover, we describe how the EXTRA technologies targeting the Amazon F1 cloud compute instances can be used in medical applications such as the retinal image segmentation.