Reconfigurable Computing (RC) is an area of computer systems architecture
that studies the use of reconfigurable logic as a computational device
to be used along with other computing structures such as integer ALUs,
memory management units, floating-point multipliers, disk controlers,
and network interfaces. As a practical matter, today RC is usually
built with FPGAs. RC is also known as ``Custom Computing Machines''
(CCMs) or just ``Configurable Computing.'' By reconfigurable logic,
we are talking about programming the hardware at the gate-level
rather than at the machine instruction level. That is, if we want to
add two binary numbers with RC, we configure a set of Configurable Logic
Blocks (CLBs) to perform the appropriate AND/OR/NOT operations and
then configure routing resources to logically connect CLBs into an
``add'' circuit. The Clemson University Reconfigurable Computing effort
is housed in the
Parallel Architecture Research Laboratory (PARL). Find a more detailed
introduction to Reconfigurable Computing (RC)
here.
