A configurable computer is a computing device that may be modified at run-time to provide application-specific computer hardware to support the computation of a task. A coupled configurable computer uses a configurable coprocessor to provide specialized hardware to perform a specific task while the remainder of the computer system works on other tasks. The fact that the hardware functionality of a configurable coprocessor may be specialized at run-time allows this coprocessor to effectively behave like a larger system of coprocessors. Previous research has shown that configurable coprocessors can significantly enhance the performance of an application and/or computer system on niche applications.

This thesis investigates the quantitative and qualitative impacts of configurable coprocessors on the performance of a computer system. A transaction pair model of a configurable coprocessor operation is introduced. This model enables the development of a complete performance model that predicts the behaviour of a coupled configurable computer system. To quantify the parameters used by this model, a series of experiments were conducted. These experiments demonstrate that it is possible to transform an existing computer system into a coupled configurable computer system without the knowledge of the end user. Furthermore, the performance model can be used to predict when it is likely to be advantageous to use a configurable coprocessor to enhance an application and a computer system. The experiments show that the major factors impacting performance of an application are processing time, memory utilization delays, bus utilization delays, and operating system behaviour delays. These findings suggest that a tightly-coupled configurable computer architecture is better suited to mainstream software applications than a loosely-coupled configurable computer architecture.