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

Reconfigurable Mesh Techniques and Applications

Prof. Jerry L. Trahan, Louisiana State Univ., USA

The reconfigurable mesh (R-Mesh) is a computational model that captures many aspects of reconfigurable computation. It comprises an array of processing elements in which each processor has fixed external connections to its neighbors and configurable internal connections among its ports. Local configuration decisions collectively form buses for communication across the array. While the ability to change configurations at every step is ambitious, the abstraction provided by the R-Mesh allows exploring the limits to which communication configurations can enhance computation. This talk will overview results in several application areas that developed key techniques for the R-Mesh. It will also describe ways to curb the assumptions of the model to enable realizing operations and connections. In addition, it will examine a case in which the R-Mesh serves as the base for algorithm development of a packet switch scheduler implemented in a different structure.

Jerry L. Trahan received his B.S. from Louisiana State University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Louisiana State University. His research interests include run-time reconfiguration, models of parallel computation, and theory of computation. He is a co-author of the book Dynamic Reconfiguration: Architectures and Algorithms.