Implementation of a centralized scheduler for the Mitrion Virtual Processor

Abstract: Mitrionics is a company based in Lund, Sweden. They develop a platform for FPGA-based acceleration, the platform includes a virtual processor, the Mitrion Virtual Processor, that can be custom built to fit the application that is to be accelerated. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the possible benefits of using a centralized scheduler for the Mitrion Virtual Processor instead of the current solution which is a distributed scheduler. A centralized scheduler has been implemented and evaluated using a set of benchmark applications. It has been found that the centralized scheduler can decrease the number of registers used to implement the Mitrion Virtual Processor on an FPGA. The size of the decrease depends on the application, and certain applications are more suitable than others. It has also been found that the introduction of a centralized scheduler makes it more difficult for the place and route tool to fit a design on the FPGA resulting in failed timing constraints for the largest benchmark application.