VLPW: The Very Long Packet Window Architecture for High Throughput Network-On-Chip Router Designs

ChipMulti-processor (CMP) architectures have become mainstream for designing processors. With a large number of cores, Network-On-Chip (NOC) provides a scalable communication method for CMPs. NOC must be carefully designed to provide low latencies and high throughput in the resource-constrained environment. To improve the network throughput, we propose the Very Long Packet Window (VLPW) architecture for the NOC router design that tries to close the throughput gap between state-of-the-art on-chip routers and the ideal interconnect fabric. To improve throughput, VLPW optimizes Switch Allocation (SA) efficiency. Existing SA normally applies Round-Robin scheduling to arbitrate among the packets targeting the same output port. However, this simple approach suffers from low arbitration efficiency and incurs low network throughput. Instead of relying solely on simple switch scheduling, the VLPW router design globally schedules all the input packets, resolves the output conflicts and achieves high throughput. With the VLPW architecture, we propose two scheduling schemes: Global Fairness and Global Diversity. Our simulation results show that the VLPW router achieves more than 20% throughput improvement without negative effects on zero-load latency

Design tradeoffs for hard and soft FPGA-based Networks-on-Chip

FPGAs has the potential not only to improve the efficiency of the interconnect, but also to increase designer productivity and reduce compile time by raising the abstraction level of communication. By comparing NoC components on FPGAs and ASICs we quantify the efficiency gap between the two platforms and use the results to understand the design tradeoffs in that space. The crossbar has the largest FPGA vs. ASIC gaps: 85× area and 4.4 × delay, while the input buffers have the smallest: 17 × area and 2.9 × delay. For a soft NoC router, these results indicate that wide datapaths, deep buffers and a small number of ports and virtual channels (VC) are favorable for FPGA implementation. If one hardens a complete state-of-the-art VC router it is on average 30 × more area efficient and can achieve 3.6 × the maximum frequency of a soft implementation. We show that this hard router can be integrated with the soft FPGA interconnect, and still achieve an area improvement of 22×. A 64-node NoC of hard routers with soft interconnect utilizes area equivalent to 1.6 % of the logic modules in the latest FPGAs, compared to 33 % for a soft NoC. I

DDRNoC: Dual Data-Rate Network-on-Chip

This article introduces DDRNoC, an on-chip interconnection network capable of routing packets at Dual Data Rate. The cycle time of current 2D-mesh Network-on-Chip routers is limited by their control as opposed to the datapath (switch and link traversal), which exhibits significant slack. DDRNoC capitalizes on this observation, allowing two flits per cycle to share the same datapath. Thereby, DDRNoC achieves higher throughput than a Single Data Rate (SDR) network. Alternatively, using lower voltage circuits, the above slack can be exploited to reduce power consumption while matching the SDR network throughput. In addition, DDRNoC exhibits reduced clock distribution power, improving energy efficiency, as it needs a slower clock than a SDR network that routes packets at the same rate. Post place and route results in 28nm technology show that, compared to an iso-voltage (1.1V) SDR network, DDRNoC improves throughput proportionally to the SDR datapath slack. Moreover, a low-voltage (0.95V) DDRNoC implementation converts that slack to power reduction offering the 1.1V SDR throughput at a substantially lower energy cost

Efficient Intra-Rack Resource Disaggregation for HPC Using Co-Packaged DWDM Photonics

The diversity of workload requirements and increasing hardware heterogeneity in emerging high performance computing (HPC) systems motivate resource disaggregation. Resource disaggregation allows compute and memory resources to be allocated individually as required to each workload. However, it is unclear how to efficiently realize this capability and cost-effectively meet the stringent bandwidth and latency requirements of HPC applications. To that end, we describe how modern photonics can be co-designed with modern HPC racks to implement flexible intra-rack resource disaggregation and fully meet the bit error rate (BER) and high escape bandwidth of all chip types in modern HPC racks. Our photonic-based disaggregated rack provides an average application speedup of 11% (46% maximum) for 25 CPU and 61% for 24 GPU benchmarks compared to a similar system that instead uses modern electronic switches for disaggregation. Using observed resource usage from a production system, we estimate that an iso-performance intra-rack disaggregated HPC system using photonics would require 4x fewer memory modules and 2x fewer NICs than a non-disaggregated baseline.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables. Published in IEEE Cluster 202

Priority Based Switch Allocator in Adaptive Physical Channel Regulator for On Chip Interconnects

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) are now popular design paradigm for microprocessors due to their power, performance and complexity advantages where a number of relatively simple cores are integrated on a single die. On chip interconnection network (NoC) is an excellent architectural paradigm which offers a stable and generalized communication platform for large scale of chip multiprocessors. The existing model APCR has three regulation schemes designed at switch allocation stage of NoC router pipelining, such as monopolizing, fair-sharing and channel-stealing. Its aim is to fairly allocate physical bandwidth in the form of flit level transmission unit while breaking the conventional assumptions i.e.its size is same as phit size. They have implemented channel-stealing scheme using the existing round-robin scheduler which is a well known scheduling algorithm for providing fairness, which is not an optimal solution. In this thesis, we have extended the efficiency of APCR model and propose three efficient scheduling policies for the channel stealing scheme in order to provide better quality of service (QoS). Our work can be divided into three parts. In the first part, we implemented ratio based scheduling technique in which we keep track of average number of its sent from each input in every cycle. It not only provides fairness among virtual channels (VCs), but also increases the saturation throughput of the network. In the second part, we have implemented an age based scheduling technique where we prioritize the VC, based on the age of the requesting flits. The age of each request is calculated as the difference between the time of injection and the current simulation time. Age based scheduler minimizes the packet latency. In the last part, we implemented a Static-Priority based scheduler. In this case, we arbitrarily assign random priorities to the packets at the time of their injection into the network. In this case, the high priority packets can be forwarded to any of the VCs, whereas the low priority packets can be forwarded to a limited number of VCs. So, basically Static-Priority based scheduler limits the accessibility on the number of VCs depending upon the packet priority. We study the performance metrics such as the average packet latency, and saturation throughput resulted by all the three new scheduling techniques. We demonstrate our simulation results for all three scheduling policies i.e. bit complement, transpose and uniform random considering from very low (no load) to high load injection rates. We evaluate the performance improvement because of our proposed scheduling techniques in APCR comparing with the performance of basic NoC design. The performance is also compared with the results found in monopolizing, fair-sharing and round-robin schemes for channel-stealing of APCR. It is observed from the simulation results using our detailed cycle-accurate simulator that our new scheduling policies implemented in APCR model improves the network throughput by 10% in case of synthetic workloads, compared with the existing round-robin scheme. Also, our scheduling policy in APCR model outperforms the baseline router by 28X under synthetic workloads

VLPW: The Very Long Packet Window Architecture for High Throughput Network-On-Chip Router Designs

ChipMulti-processor (CMP) architectures have become mainstream for designing processors. With a large number of cores, Network-On-Chip (NOC) provides a scalable communication method for CMPs. NOC must be carefully designed to provide low latencies and high throughput in the resource-constrained environment. To improve the network throughput, we propose the Very Long Packet Window (VLPW) architecture for the NOC router design that tries to close the throughput gap between state-of-the-art on-chip routers and the ideal interconnect fabric. To improve throughput, VLPW optimizes Switch Allocation (SA) efficiency. Existing SA normally applies Round-Robin scheduling to arbitrate among the packets targeting the same output port. However, this simple approach suffers from low arbitration efficiency and incurs low network throughput. Instead of relying solely on simple switch scheduling, the VLPW router design globally schedules all the input packets, resolves the output conflicts and achieves high throughput. With the VLPW architecture, we propose two scheduling schemes: Global Fairness and Global Diversity. Our simulation results show that the VLPW router achieves more than 20% throughput improvement without negative effects on zero-load latency

Microarchitectural simulator for shader cores in a modern GPU simulation infrastructure

The objective of this project is to redesign the shader cores in TEAPOT, a cycle-accurate simulator for mobile-GPU systems, validate it's functionality and accuracy and then explore the new microarchitecture by performing experiments on it

DDRNoC: Dual Data-Rate Network-on-Chip

This paper introduces DDRNoC, an on-chip interconnection network able to route packets at Dual Data Rate. The cycle time of current 2D-mesh Network-on-Chip routers is limited by their control as opposed to the datapath (switch and link traversal) which exhibits significant slack. DDRNoC capitalizes on this observation allowing two flits per cycle to share the same datapath. Thereby, DDRNoC achieves higher throughput than a Single Data Rate (SDR) network. Alternatively, using lower voltage circuits, the above slack can be exploited to reduce power consumption while matching the SDR network throughput. In addition, DDRNoC exhibits reduced clock distribution power, improving energy efficiency, as it needs a slower clock than a SDR network that routes packets at the same rate. Post place and route results in 28 nm technology show that, compared to an iso-voltage (1.1V) SDR network, DDRNoC improves throughput proportionally to the SDR datapath slack. Moreover, a low-voltage (0.95V) DDRNoC implementation converts that slack to power reduction offering the 1.1V SDR throughput at a substantially lower energy cost

Design and Analysis of Router Architectures for NoC

The advance of process technology keeps on reducing the device size. As a result, the number of processing elements that can be integrated on a single chip (SoC) increases. The reduction in the device size also reducing the gate delay compared to the wire delay giving rise to increase in the frequency of operation of the devices. Further, in order to reduce the design time to market the communication system must support the plug and play architecture and should support design reuse. The conventional on-chip communication architecture, which consists of point-to-point connection and bus infrastructure, may not be able to provide sufficient communication requirements for SoC in terms of increasing the frequency of operation, providing reliability and flexibility. Further, conventional communication systems used for on-chip communication are not scalable and does not support design reuse. The NOC design represents a new paradigm to design multi-processor SoC which is scalable and supports design reuse. The NOC architecture uses layered protocols and packet switched networks which consist of on-chip routers, links and network interface on a predefined topology. NoC requires many on-chip resources which can increase the cost, area and power consumption. The efficiency of the NoC depends on how the resources are utilized for traversing the packet from source to destination which is determined by the flow control mechanism. The components which are used in the NoC for establishing communication between the modules of SoC were designed using VERILOG HDL. Different types of router architectures used by NoC were also designed mentioning their merits and demerits and their area and power consumption was also estimate