Flowware
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Flowware is the second program source needed for morphware in Reconfigurable Computing, i. e. for reconfigurable platforms like FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), or, for coarse-grained reconfigurable platforms like reconfigurable datapath arrays (rDPAs). As soon as reconfiguration by code having been compiled from a configware source has been completed, so that the ressources are ready for use, a suitable flowware code has to be compiled for data scheduling implementation.
As proposed by Nick Tredennick the role of flowware in Reconfigurable Computing can be illustrated in contrast to the role of software. For programming instruction-stream-based resources like with a von Neumann architecture, only one programming source is needed to change the algorithms: software. The resources, however, are fixed (hardwired). But with reconfigurable platforms (which are data-stream-based, since there is never an instruction fetch at run time) both is variable: resources and algorithms, so that two program sources are needed: configware to prepare the resources, and flowware (tailored to these configurations) to schedule the data streams leaving and entering the resources.
