Virtualization of heterogeneous machines

Lime is a new Java-compatible and object-oriented language designed to make programming of reconfigurable hardware significantly more accessible to skilled software developers. Lime programs may run either in software (via Java bytecodes) or in hardware (via behavioral and logic synthesis). This paper illustrates the salient synthesis-oriented features of the language using a photomosaic algorithm with inherent bit, pipeline, and data parallelism. The result is a virtual machine abstraction that extends across a heterogeneous architecture comprising a CPU, FPGA, and other computational structures. © 2011 ACM.