Architecture for Runtime Hardware Compilation

Runtime compilation of a platform-independent intermediate representation may overcome issues of programmability and portability in reconfigurable processors, allowing them become mainstream. Dynamic compilation makes the hardware transparent to the programmer and improves the portability of applications. However compilation overheads, which are significantly greater than in software compilation, must be surmounted. Targeting simple hardware, compiling only frequently executing code and saving compilations are employed to reduce compilation overheads making dynamic compilation effective. This paper describes a feasibility study on the effectiveness of this approach to hardware dynamic compilation and shows advantages when a small proportion of the code is retained as a hardware implementation.