Updating hardware libraries for use by applications on a computer system with an FPGA coprocessor

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9424019-B2
Application number	US-201213528329-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jun 20, 2012
Priority date	Jun 20, 2012
Publication date	Aug 23, 2016
Grant date	Aug 23, 2016

Abstract

A computer system includes one or more field programmable gate arrays as a coprocessor that can be shared among processes and programmed using hardware libraries. Given a set of hardware libraries, an update process periodically updates the libraries and/or adds new libraries. One or more update servers can provide information about libraries available for download, either in response to a request or by notifying systems using such libraries. New available libraries can be presented to a user for selection and download. Requests for updated libraries can arise in several ways, such as through polling for updates, exceptions from applications attempting to use libraries, and upon compilation of application code.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A computer-implemented process comprising:
receiving into memory, from a hardware library store, information describing hardware libraries, the hardware libraries storing code used in a computer system to program a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to perform operations requested by one or more applications;
receiving into memory, from an update server, information describing updates to the hardware libraries used to program the FPGA;
updating the har…

Assignees

• Nightingale Edmund B
• Lamacchia Brian
• Barham Paul
• Microsoft Technology Licensing Llc

Inventors

• Nightingale Edmund B
• Lamacchia Brian
• Barham Paul

Classifications

• G06F9/44521

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F8/65 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F15/7871

  Physics · mapped topic