The BondMachine: a fully reconfigurable computing ecosystem

The aim of the BondMachine (BM) project is to implement a computing system to enable a real and full exploitation of the underlying hardware. This is a key to the success in the era of hybrid computing. In order to achieve this objective the BM has been designed to create a heterogeneous and flexible architecture on top of FPGAs. Moreover the overall vision is based on a reduction of the number of hardware/software layers which by product guarantees a simpler software development. As such, the BM project has been thought as a complete reconfigurable computing ecosystem that, starting from a high-level description, creates both the hardware and the software that runs on it.

The two architectural pillars are computing elements (processors) and non-computing elements (for example memories, channels, barriers). The latter are meant to be shared among processors. Finally, thanks to a custom network protocol, many BondMachines can be interconnected together, therefore building heterogeneous multi-core systems or even clusters of multi-cores.

The flexibility of the BM makes possible the implementation of any computing system ranging from networks of small agents, like IoT (Internet of Things), to high-performance devices for ML (Machine Learning) or real time data analysis, and even systems that mix all this different characteristics together. The BM can interact with standard Linux workstations both as a special purpose hardware accelerator or as part of a
computer/BM hybrid clusters.