640 research outputs found
Exploring Adaptive Implementation of On-Chip Networks
As technology geometries have shrunk to the deep submicron regime, the communication delay and power consumption of global interconnections in high performance Multi- Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) are becoming a major bottleneck. The Network-on- Chip (NoC) architecture paradigm, based on a modular packet-switched mechanism, can address many of the on-chip communication issues such as performance limitations of long interconnects and integration of large number of Processing Elements (PEs) on a chip. The choice of routing protocol and NoC structure can have a significant impact on performance and power consumption in on-chip networks. In addition, building a high performance, area and energy efficient on-chip network for multicore architectures requires a novel on-chip router allowing a larger network to be integrated on a single die with reduced power consumption. On top of that, network interfaces are employed to decouple computation resources from communication resources, to provide the synchronization between them, and to achieve backward compatibility with existing IP cores.
Three adaptive routing algorithms are presented as a part of this thesis. The first presented routing protocol is a congestion-aware adaptive routing algorithm for 2D mesh NoCs which does not support multicast (one-to-many) traffic while the other two protocols are adaptive routing models supporting both unicast (one-to-one) and multicast traffic. A streamlined on-chip router architecture is also presented for avoiding congested areas in 2D mesh NoCs via employing efficient input and output selection. The output selection utilizes an adaptive routing algorithm based on the congestion condition of neighboring routers while the input selection allows packets to be serviced from each input port according to its congestion level. Moreover, in order to increase memory parallelism and bring compatibility with existing IP cores in network-based multiprocessor architectures, adaptive network interface architectures are presented to use multiple SDRAMs which can be accessed simultaneously. In addition, a smart memory controller is integrated in the adaptive network interface to improve the memory utilization and reduce both memory and network latencies.
Three Dimensional Integrated Circuits (3D ICs) have been emerging as a viable candidate to achieve better performance and package density as compared to traditional 2D ICs. In addition, combining the benefits of 3D IC and NoC schemes provides a significant performance gain for 3D architectures. In recent years, inter-layer communication across multiple stacked layers (vertical channel) has attracted a lot of interest. In this thesis, a novel adaptive pipeline bus structure is proposed for inter-layer communication to improve the performance by reducing the delay and complexity of traditional bus arbitration. In addition, two mesh-based topologies for 3D architectures are also introduced to mitigate the inter-layer footprint and power dissipation on each layer with a small performance penalty.Siirretty Doriast
NoCo: ILP-based worst-case contention estimation for mesh real-time manycores
Manycores are capable of providing the computational demands required by functionally-advanced critical applications in domains such as automotive and avionics. In manycores a network-on-chip (NoC) provides access to shared caches and memories and hence concentrates most of the contention that tasks suffer, with effects on the worst-case contention delay (WCD) of packets and tasks' WCET. While several proposals minimize the impact of individual NoC parameters on WCD, e.g. mapping and routing, there are strong dependences among these NoC parameters. Hence, finding the optimal NoC configurations requires optimizing all parameters simultaneously, which represents a multidimensional optimization problem. In this paper we propose NoCo, a novel approach that combines ILP and stochastic optimization to find NoC configurations in terms of packet routing, application mapping, and arbitration weight allocation. Our results show that NoCo improves other techniques that optimize a subset of NoC parameters.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant TIN2015-
65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. It also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (agreement No. 772773). Carles Hernández
is jointly supported by the MINECO and FEDER funds
through grant TIN2014-60404-JIN. Jaume Abella has been
partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and
Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship
number RYC-2013-14717. Enrico Mezzetti has been partially
supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
under Juan de la Cierva-Incorporaci´on postdoctoral
fellowship number IJCI-2016-27396.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
A Scalable and Adaptive Network on Chip for Many-Core Architectures
In this work, a scalable network on chip (NoC) for future many-core architectures is proposed and investigated. It supports different QoS mechanisms to ensure predictable communication. Self-optimization is introduced to adapt the energy footprint and the performance of the network to the communication requirements. A fault tolerance concept allows to deal with permanent errors. Moreover, a template-based automated evaluation and design methodology and a synthesis flow for NoCs is introduced
Application-Aware Deadlock-Free Oblivious Routing
Conventional oblivious routing algorithms are either not application-aware or assume that each flow has its own private channel to ensure deadlock avoidance. We present a framework for application-aware routing that assures deadlock-freedom under one or more channels by forcing routes to conform to an acyclic channel dependence graph. Arbitrary minimal routes can be made deadlock-free through appropriate static channel allocation when two or more channels are available. Given bandwidth estimates for flows, we present a mixed integer-linear programming (MILP) approach and a heuristic approach for producing deadlock-free routes that minimize maximum channel load. The heuristic algorithm is calibrated using the MILP algorithm and evaluated on a number of benchmarks through detailed network simulation. Our framework can be used to produce application-aware routes that target the minimization of latency, number of flows through a link, bandwidth, or any combination thereof
Application-Aware Deadlock-Free Oblivious Routing
Conventional oblivious routing algorithms are either not application-aware or assume that each flow has its own private channel to ensure deadlock avoidance. We present a framework for application-aware routing that assures deadlock-freedom under one or more channels by forcing routes to conform to an acyclic channel dependence graph. Arbitrary minimal routes can be made deadlock-free through appropriate static channel allocation when two or more channels are available. Given bandwidth estimates for flows, we present a mixed integer-linear programming (MILP) approach and a heuristic approach for producing deadlock-free routes that minimize maximum channel load. The heuristic algorithm is calibrated using the MILP algorithm and evaluated on a number of benchmarks through detailed network simulation. Our framework can be used to produce application-aware routes that target the minimization of latency, number of flows through a link, bandwidth, or any combination thereof
Interconnects architectures for many-core era using surface-wave communication
PhD ThesisNetworks-on-chip (NoCs) is a communication paradigm that has
emerged aiming to address on-chip communication challenges and
to satisfy interconnection demands for chip-multiprocessors (CMPs).
Nonetheless, there is continuous demand for even higher computational
power, which is leading to a relentless downscaling of CMOS
technology to enable the integration of many-cores. However, technology
downscaling is in favour of the gate nodes over wires in terms
of latency and power consumption. Consequently, this has led to the
era of many-core processors where power consumption and performance
are governed by inter-core communications rather than core
computation. Therefore, NoCs need to evolve from being merely metalbased
implementations which threaten to be a performance and power
bottleneck for many-core efficiency and scalability.
To overcome such intensified inter-core communication challenges,
this thesis proposes a novel interconnect technology: the surface-wave
interconnect (SWI). This new RF-based on-chip interconnect has notable
characteristics compared to cutting-edge on-chip interconnects
in terms of CMOS compatibility, high speed signal propagation, low
power dissipation, and massive signal fan-out. Nonetheless, the realization
of the SWI requires investigations at different levels of abstraction,
such as the device integration and RF engineering levels. The aim
of this thesis is to address the networking and system level challenges
and highlight the potential of this interconnect. This should
encourage further research at other levels of abstraction. Two specific
system-level challenges crucial in future many-core systems are tackled
in this study, which are cross-the-chip global communication and
one-to-many communication.
This thesis makes four major contributions towards this aim. The
first is reducing the NoC average-hop count, which would otherwise
increase packet-latency exponentially, by proposing a novel hybrid
interconnect architecture. This hybrid architecture can not only utilize
both regular metal-wire and SWI, but also exploits merits of
both bus and NoC architectures in terms of connectivity compared to
other general-purpose on-chip interconnect architectures. The second
contribution addresses global communication issues by developing
a distance-based weighted-round-robin arbitration (DWA) algorithm.
This technique prioritizes global communication to be send via SWI
short-cuts, which offer more efficient power dissipation and faster
across-the-chip signal propagation. Results obtained using a cycleaccurate
simulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
system architecture in terms of significant power reduction, considervii
able average delay reduction and higher throughput compared to a
regular NoC. The third contribution is in handling multicast communications,
which are normally associated with traffic overload, hotspots
and deadlocks and therefore increase, by an order of magnitude the
power consumption and latency. This has been achieved by proposing
a novel routing and centralized arbitration schemes that exploits
the SWI0s remarkable fan-out features. The evaluation demonstrates
drastic improvements in the effectiveness of the proposed architecture
in terms of power consumption ( 2-10x) and performance ( 22x) but
with negligible hardware overheads ( 2%). The fourth contribution is
to further explore multicast contention handling in a flexible decentralized
manner, where original techniques such as stretch-multicast
and ID-tagging flow control have been developed. A comparison of
these techniques shows that the decentralized approach is superior
to the centralized approach with low traffic loads, while the latter
outperforms the former near and after NoC saturation
Design and implementation of NoC routers and their application to Prdt-based NoC\u27s
With a communication-centric design style, Networks-on-Chips (NoCs) emerges as a new paradigm of Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) to overcome the limitations of bus-based communication infrastructure. An important problem in the design of NoCs is the router design, which has great impact on the cost and performance of a NoC system. This thesis is focused on the design and implementation of an optimized parameterized router which can be applied in mesh/torus-based and Perfect Recursive Diagonal Torus (PRDT)-based NoCs; In specific, the router design includes the design and implementation of two routing algorithms (vector routing and circular coded vector routing), the wormhole switching scheme, the scheduling scheme, buffering strategy, and flow control scheme. Correspondingly, the following components are designed and implemented: input controller, output controller, crossbar switch, and scheduler. Verilog HDL codes are generated and synthesized on ASIC platforms. Most components are designed in parameterized way. Performance evaluation of each component of the router in terms of timing, area, and power consumption is conducted. The efficiency of the two routing algorithms and tradeoff between computational time (tsetup) and area are analyzed; To reduce the area cost of the router design, the two major components, the crossbar switch and the scheduler, are optimized. Particularly, for crossbar switch, a comparative study of two crossbar designs is performed with the aid of Magic Layout editor, Synopsys CosmosSE and Awaves; Based on the router design, the PRDT network composed of 4x4 routers is designed and synthesized on ASIC platforms
Adaptive Routing Approaches for Networked Many-Core Systems
Through advances in technology, System-on-Chip design is moving towards integrating tens to hundreds of intellectual property blocks into a single chip. In such a many-core system, on-chip communication becomes a performance bottleneck for high performance designs. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has emerged as a viable solution for the communication challenges in highly complex chips. The NoC architecture paradigm, based on a modular packet-switched mechanism, can address many of the on-chip communication challenges such as wiring complexity, communication latency, and bandwidth. Furthermore, the combined benefits of 3D IC and NoC schemes provide the possibility of designing a high performance system in a limited chip area. The major advantages of 3D NoCs are the considerable reductions in average latency and power consumption.
There are several factors degrading the performance of NoCs. In this thesis, we investigate three main performance-limiting factors: network congestion, faults, and the lack of efficient multicast support. We address these issues by the means of routing algorithms.
Congestion of data packets may lead to increased network latency and power consumption. Thus, we propose three different approaches for alleviating such congestion in the network. The first approach is based on measuring the congestion information in different regions of the network, distributing the information over the network, and utilizing this information when making a routing decision. The second approach employs a learning method to dynamically find the less congested routes according to the underlying traffic. The third approach is based on a fuzzy-logic technique to perform better routing decisions when traffic information of different routes is available.
Faults affect performance significantly, as then packets should take longer paths in order to be routed around the faults, which in turn increases congestion around the faulty regions. We propose four methods to tolerate faults at the link and switch level by using only the shortest paths as long as such path exists. The unique characteristic among these methods is the toleration of faults while also maintaining the performance of NoCs. To the best of our knowledge, these algorithms are the first approaches to bypassing faults prior to reaching them while avoiding unnecessary misrouting of packets.
Current implementations of multicast communication result in a significant performance loss for unicast traffic. This is due to the fact that the routing rules of multicast packets limit the adaptivity of unicast packets. We present an approach in which both unicast and multicast packets can be efficiently routed within the network. While suggesting a more efficient multicast support, the proposed approach does not affect the performance of unicast routing at all. In addition, in order to reduce the overall path length of multicast packets, we present several partitioning methods along with their analytical models for latency measurement. This approach is discussed in the context of 3D mesh networks.Siirretty Doriast
- …