Reconfigurable hardware is now used in high performance computers, introducing the high performance reconfigurable computing. Dynamic hardware allows processors to devolve intensive computations to dedicated hardware circuitry optimized for that purpose. Our aim is to make larger use of hardware capabilities by pooling the hardware and software computations resources in a unified design in order to allow replacing the ones by the others depending on the application needs. For that purpose, we needed a test platform to evaluate FPGA capabilities to operate as a high performance computer node. We designed an architecture allowing the separation of a parallel program communication from its kernels computation in order to make easier the future partial dynamic reconfiguration of the processing elements. This architecture implements static softcores as test IPs, keeping in mind that the future platform implementing dynamic reconfiguration will allow changing the processing elements. In this paper, we present this test architecture and its implementation upon Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGAs. We then present a benchmark of the platform using the NAS parallel benchmark integer sort in order to compare various use cases.

There is a growing research interest in studying microgrids as a way to overcome the lack of access to energy. These microgrids could be the key to global energy access because of their many advantages related to flexibility, efficiency, and reliability. Despite all these qualities, microgrids remain challenging to implement in a sustainable and resilient way without a clear consensus on what causes these failures. To this end, this work proposes a new paradigm to make a multidisciplinary and comprehensive review of the operation of microgrids. By reconciling the different fields inherent to microgrids, this review enables the study of microgrids within a unified framework. Microgrids will be presented through energy, information, financial, and social fields to provide the necessary elements for their systemic understanding. Each field will be presented with its internal elements, architecture, and significant issues. By elaborating on this new vision of microgrids, this article hopes to open the way to a deeper understanding of their systemic operation and diagnose their long-term sustainability.

International audienceReconfigurable hardware offers new ways of accelerating computing by implementing hardware accelerators at run time. In this article, we present an approach allowing a hardware/software codesign of applications in which implementation can be chosen at run time depending on available resources. We propose a platform supporting this flow and describe its different implementations used to prove the feasibility of our approach. This platform allows the underlying hardware to be virtualized in order to have a generic architecture that can be used to run applications. Partial dynamic reconfiguration is used over Xilinx Virtex 5 boards to enhance reconfiguration capabilities

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