Title:	BORPH, an operating system framework for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers
Date:	October 17, 2006 (Tuesday)
Time:	4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Venue:	Room 121, 1/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:	Hayden So Ph.D. candidate Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) University of California Berkeley USA

ABSTRACT:

Advances in FPGA-based reconfigurable computers have made them very attractive computing platforms for a vast variety of computation demanding areas such as bioinformatics, speech recognition, network security and high-end digital signal processing. The lack of common and intuitive operating system support, however, hinders their wide deployments.

In this talk, I will present BORPH, an operating system framework for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers with a goal to ease and accelerate development of high-level applications to run on these computers. It provides kernel support for FPGA resources by extending a standard Linux operating system. Users therefore compile and execute hardware processes on FPGA resources the same way they run software processes on conventional processor-based systems. BORPH offers run-time general file system support to hardware processes as if they were software. Furthermore, a virtual file system is built to allow access to memories and registers defined in the FPGA, which provides communication links between hardware and software.

Since the introduction of BORPH to our FPGA-based platform, BEE2, we have observed increased productivity among high-level application developers, who have few previous experience in hardware design. I will also briefly describe our Simulink-based design flow that our applications are developed with, and how it is integrated with BORPH.

BIOGRAPHY:

Hayden So is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses in operating system design for reconfigurable computers, computer architecture and hardware/software codesign methodology.

He received his Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in EECS from U.C. Berkeley in 2000 and 1998 respectively. He has previously worked as an intern at Xilinx research lab where he developed a virtual file system for FPGA dynamic reconfiguration, and as a hardware engineer at Googol Technology, a startup company partly funded by Technology Transfer Center (TTC) of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

He is currently finishing his Ph.D. thesis at U.C. Berkeley.

Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444

For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar