@article{2420, abstract = {{ This paper presents the acceleration of minimum-cost covering problems by instance-specific hardware. First, we formulate the minimum-cost covering problem and discuss a branch \& bound algorithm to solve it. Then we describe instance-specific hardware architectures that implement branch \& bound in 3-valued logic and use reduction techniques similar to those found in software solvers. We further present prototypical accelerator implementations and a corresponding design tool flow. Our experiments reveal significant raw speedups up to five orders of magnitude for a set of smaller unate covering problems. Provided that hardware compilation times can be reduced, we conclude that instance-specific acceleration of hard minimum-cost covering problems will lead to substantial overall speedups. }}, author = {{Plessl, Christian and Platzner, Marco}}, issn = {{0920-8542}}, journal = {{Journal of Supercomputing}}, keywords = {{reconfigurable computing, instance-specific acceleration, minimum covering}}, number = {{2}}, pages = {{109--129}}, publisher = {{Kluwer Academic Publishers}}, title = {{{Instance-Specific Accelerators for Minimum Covering}}}, doi = {{10.1023/a:1024443416592}}, volume = {{26}}, year = {{2003}}, } @inproceedings{2428, abstract = {{ In this paper we present instance-specific accelerators for minimum-cost covering problems. We first define the covering problem and discuss a branch&bound algorithm to solve it. Then we describe an instance-specific hardware architecture that implements branch&bound in 3-valued logic and uses reduction techniques usually found in software solvers. Results for small unate covering problems reveal significant raw speedups. }}, author = {{Plessl, Christian and Platzner, Marco}}, booktitle = {{Proc. Int. Conf. on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms (ERSA)}}, keywords = {{minimum covering, accelerator, funding-sundance}}, pages = {{85--91}}, publisher = {{CSREA Press}}, title = {{{Instance-Specific Accelerators for Minimum Covering}}}, year = {{2001}}, }