Liquid Circuits: Automated Dynamic Hardware Acceleration of Compute-Intensive Applications

Imagine PCs could morph their hardware to match the programs that are running. After a while, new programs running on a machine would suddenly speed up by up to 10 times because the hardware has adapted to the new task. When running an application for the first time, the microprocessor reads the instructions of the new program and executes them. While executing the program the PC looks for ways to run the program faster. The next time the program is used, the computer uses the experience from the previous runs to do a better job. The process of utilising experience is called dynamic optimisation. In this project, we take a bold step forward and claim that it is possible to build a computer which learns how to execute programs faster by changing it's own hardware to adapt to the problem being solved. The result can be more than 10 times faster computers at the price of a graphics acceleration card such as nVidia or ATI.