Minority-game-based resource allocation for run-time reconfigurable multi-core processors

A novel policy for allocating reconfigurable fabric resources in multi-core processors is presented. We deploy a Minority-Game to maximize the efficient use of the reconfigurable fabric while meeting performance constraints of individual tasks running on the cores. As we will show, the Minority Game ensures a fair allocation of resources, e.g., no single core will monopolize the reconfigurable fabric. Rather, all cores receive a "fair" share of the fabric, i.e., their tasks would miss their performance constraints by approximately the same margin, thus ensuring an overall graceful degradation. The policy is implemented on a Virtex-4 FPGA and evaluated for diverse applications ranging from security to multimedia domains. Our results show that the Minority-Game policy achieves on average 2x higher application performance and a 5x improved efficiency of resource utilization compared to state-of-the-art.