Instance-Specific Accelerators for Minimum Covering Plessl, Christian Platzner, Marco reconfigurable computing instance-specific acceleration minimum covering 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. Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003 info:eu-repo/semantics/article doc-type:article text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501 https://ris.uni-paderborn.de/record/2420 Plessl C, Platzner M. Instance-Specific Accelerators for Minimum Covering. <i>Journal of Supercomputing</i>. 2003;26(2):109-129. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1024443416592">10.1023/a:1024443416592</a> eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1023/a:1024443416592 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/0920-8542 info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess