ERSA’2008
The International Conference on
Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms

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Multicore Devices: The New Generation of Reconfigurable Architectures

Dr. Steven A. Guccione, Cmpware, Inc., USA

For two decades, reconfigurable computing systems have provided an attractive alternative to fixed hardware solutions. Reconfigurable computing systems have demonstrated the low cost and flexibility of a software solution combined with the high performance of fixed hardware. For a variety of practical reasons, much of the work in this area focused on commercial FPGA devices as the underlying hardware platform. Recently, several new designs have diverged from the bit-level, circuit-oriented architectures of FPGAs and produced a variety of architectures more suitable for computation and high level language programming. These new highly parallel architectures contain a relatively large number of programmable cores, each approaching the complexity of a traditional microprocessor. Today such devices can be found in popular consumer electronics including game consoles and desktop PC graphics controllers as well as a new generation of supercomputers. These new devices, often described using the generic term 'multicore' represent the latest phase in the evolution of reconfigurable systems. Like earlier reconfigurable systems they promise very high performance at relatively low power with high levels of programmability. These new systems also feature software development tools geared more toward traditional high level language programming than the hardware design orientation found in earlier generations of reconfigurable systems.

Dr. Steven A. Guccione is an engineer at Cmpware, Inc., where he is working on tools for multiprocessor systems. His interests are in high performance computing, in particular software tools for parallel and reconfigurable computing. Dr. Guccione received his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Boston University, his Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. His Ph.D. dissertation, Programming Fine-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures was an early contribution in the field of reconfigurable computing, and one of the first to address software and system issues. Dr. Guccione has approximately 30 published papers in this field as well as approximately a dozen issued patents. He has previously held engineering positions Xilinx and QuickSilver Technology where he worked on innovative tools approaches for reconfigurable and multiprocessor architectures. Dr. Guccione has also held engineering positions at Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, MCC/Motorola and has consulted for several smaller companies.