Context Management Scheme Optimization of Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture for Multimedia Applications

Due to the combination of flexibility and efficiency, coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) are suitable for the implementation of computing-intensive applications. However, with the growing performance requirements, the scale of CGRA increases exponentially, which leads to configuration performance degradation and configuration power rise. Based on the analysis of configuration context features, we optimize the context management scheme of CGRA from the aspects of context cache structure and replacement strategy. The context cache is structured hierarchically to reduce the memory overhead without configuration performance degradation and a hybrid context replacement algorithm is proposed to further increase the configuration efficiency with a novel context frequency weight factor. Experimental results show that the proposed context management scheme improves the configuration performance of the base CGRA significantly by 13.6%–20.5% for H.264 decoding and 13.6%–20.5% for MPEG2 decoding with only 43% context cache cost. Compared with other works, the proposed context management scheme shows the advantages of 2.3– $6\times$ less normalized context cache size and 2.3– $2.7\times$ cache efficiency.