RAT: RC Amenability Test for Rapid Performance Prediction

While the promise of achieving speedup and additional benefits such as high performance per watt with FPGAs continues to expand, chief among the challenges with the emerging paradigm of reconfigurable computing is the complexity in application design and implementation. Before a lengthy development effort is undertaken to map a given application to hardware, it is important that a high-level parallel algorithm crafted for that application first be analyzed relative to the target platform, so as to ascertain the likelihood of success in terms of potential speedup. This article presents the RC Amenability Test, or RAT, a methodology and model developed for this purpose, supporting rapid exploration and prediction of strategic design tradeoffs during the formulation stage of application development.