Survivability Using Adaptive Reconfigurable Systems

Significant advances have been made in reconfigurable computing device technology paving the path for fast, dynamically reconfigurable systems. The biggest challenge in the way of flexible adaptive computing is runtime reconfiguration. Many difficult issues are involved in runtime reconfiguration. Some of these issues are application specific and as such need to be considered by application designer while designing the system. Adequate high-level tool support is required to assist the designer in this complex task. Other difficult issues are concerned with the hardware and software consistency and the real-time behavior of the system. The execution environment must provide enabling support for these issues. The paper discusses the issues involved in runtime reconfiguration and presents a Model Integrated approach that attempts to address some of the issues at multiple levels. The Model Integrated approach provides a design environment that assists the application designer in capturing system design, requirements and constraints, and provides analysis and automatic synthesis capability from the captured information. The synthesized system is deployed in an execution environment that provides the basic primitives for reconfiguration and enables some of the difficult issues in runtime reconfiguration.