Design of TSV-sharing topologies for cost-effective 3D networks-on-chip

The Through-Silicon Via (TSV) technology has led to major breakthroughs in 3D stacking by providing higher speed and bandwidth, as well as lower power dissipation for the inter-layer communication. However, the current TSV fabrication suffers from a considerable area footprint and yield loss. Thus, it is necessary to restrict the number of TSVs in order to design cost-effective 3D on-chip networks. This critical issue can be addressed by clustering the network such that all of the routers within each cluster share a single TSV pillar for the vertical packet transmission. In some of the existing topologies, additional cluster routers are augmented into the mesh structure to handle the shared TSVs. However, they impose either performance degradation or power/area overhead to the system. Furthermore, the resulting architecture is no longer a mesh. In this paper, we redefine the clusters by replacing some routers in the mesh with the cluster routers, such that the mesh structure is preserved. The simulation results demonstrate a better equilibrium between performance and cost, using the proposed models

On Multicast in Asynchronous Networks-on-Chip: Techniques, Architectures, and FPGA Implementation

In this era of exascale computing, conventional synchronous design techniques are facing unprecedented challenges. The consumer electronics market is replete with many-core systems in the range of 16 cores to thousands of cores on chip, integrating multi-billion transistors. However, with this ever increasing complexity, the traditional design approaches are facing key issues such as increasing chip power, process variability, aging, thermal problems, and scalability. An alternative paradigm that has gained significant interest in the last decade is asynchronous design. Asynchronous designs have several potential advantages: they are naturally energy proportional, burning power only when active, do not require complex clock distribution, are robust to different forms of variability, and provide ease of composability for heterogeneous platforms. Networks-on-chip (NoCs) is an interconnect paradigm that has been introduced to deal with the ever-increasing system complexity. NoCs provide a distributed, scalable, and efficient interconnect solution for today’s many-core systems. Moreover, NoCs are a natural match with asynchronous design techniques, as they separate communication infrastructure and timing from the computational elements. To this end, globally-asynchronous locally-synchronous (GALS) systems that interconnect multiple processing cores, operating at different clock speeds, using an asynchronous NoC, have gained significant interest. While asynchronous NoCs have several advantages, they also face a key challenge of supporting new types of traffic patterns. Once such pattern is multicast communication, where a source sends packets to arbitrary number of destinations. Multicast is not only common in parallel computing, such as for cache coherency, but also for emerging areas such as neuromorphic computing. This important capability has been largely missing from asynchronous NoCs. This thesis introduces several efficient multicast solutions for these interconnects. In particular, techniques, and network architectures are introduced to support high-performance and low-power multicast. Two leading network topologies are the focus: a variant mesh-of-trees (MoT) and a 2D mesh. In addition, for a more realistic implementation and analysis, as well as significantly advancing the field of asynchronous NoCs, this thesis also targets synthesis of these NoCs on commercial FPGAs. While there has been significant advances in FPGA technologies, there has been only limited research on implementing asynchronous NoCs on FPGAs. To this end, a systematic computeraided design (CAD) methodology has been introduced to efficiently and safely map asynchronous NoCs on FPGAs. Overall, this thesis makes the following three contributions. The first contribution is a multicast solution for a variant MoT network topology. This topology consists of simple low-radix switches, and has been used in high-performance computing platforms. A novel local speculation technique is introduced, where a subset of the network’s switches are speculative that always broadcast every packet. These switches are very simple and have high performance. Speculative switches are surrounded by non-speculative ones that route packets based on their destinations and also throttle any redundant copies created by the former. This hybrid network architecture achieved significant performance and power benefits over other multicast approaches. The second contribution is a multicast solution for a 2D-mesh topology, which is more complex with higher-radix switches and also is more commonly used. A novel continuous-time replication strategy is introduced to optimize the critical multi-way forking operation of a multicast transmission. In this technique, a multicast packet is first stored in an input port of a switch, from where it is sent through distinct output ports towards different destinations concurrently, at each output’s own rate and in continuous time. This strategy is shown to have significant latency and energy benefits over an approach that performs multicast using multiple distinct serial unicasts to each destination. Finally, a systematic CAD methodology is introduced to synthesize asynchronous NoCs on commercial FPGAs. A two-fold goal is targeted: correctness and high performance. For ease of implementation, only existing FPGA synthesis tools are used. Moreover, since asynchronous NoCs involve special asynchronous components, a comprehensive guide is introduced to map these elements correctly and efficiently. Two asynchronous NoC switches are synthesized using the proposed approach on a leading Xilinx FPGA in 28 nm: one that only handles unicast, and the other that also supports multicast. Both showed significant energy benefits with some performance gains over a state-of-the-art synchronous switch

온 칩 네트워크 설계: 매핑, 관리, 라우팅

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·정보공학부, 2016. 2. 최기영.지난 수십 년간 이어진 반도체 기술의 향상은 매니 코어의 시대를 가져다 주었다. 우리가 일상 생활에 쓰는 데스크톱 컴퓨터조차도 이미 수 개의 코어를 가지고 있으며, 수백 개의 코어를 가진 칩도 상용화되어 있다. 이러한 많은 코어들 간의 통신 기반으로서, 네트워크-온-칩(NoC)이 새로이 대두되었으며, 이는 현재 많은 연구 및 상용 제품에서 널리 사용되고 있다. 그러나 네트워크-온-칩을 매니 코어 시스템에 사용하는 데에는 여러 가지 문제가 따르며, 본 논문에서는 그 중 몇 가지를 풀어내고자 하였다. 본 논문의 두 번째 챕터에서는 NoC 기반 매니코어 구조에 작업을 할당하고 스케쥴하는 방법을 다루었다. 매니코어에의 작업 할당을 다룬 논문은 이미 많이 출판되었지만, 본 연구는 메시지 패싱과 공유 메모리, 두 가지의 통신 방식을 고려함으로써 성능과 에너지 효율을 개선하였다. 또한, 본 연구는 역방향 의존성을 가진 작업 그래프를 스케쥴하는 방법 또한 제시하였다. 3차원 적층 기술은 높아진 전력 밀도 때문에 열 문제가 심각해지는 등, 여러 가지 도전 과제를 내포하고 있다. 세 번째 챕터에서는 DVFS 기술을 이용하여 열 문제를 완화하고자 하는 기술을 소개한다. 각 코어와 라우터가 전압, 작동 속도를 조절할 수 있는 구조에서, 가장 높은 성능을 이끌어 내면서도 최대 온도를 넘어서지 않도록 한다. 세 번째와 네 번째 챕터는 조금 다른 측면을 다룬다. 3D 적층 기술을 사용할 때, 층간 통신은 주로 TSV를 이용하여 이루어진다. 그러나 TSV는 일반 wire보다 훨씬 큰 면적을 차지하기 때문에, 전체 네트워크에서의 TSV 개수는 제한되어야 할 경우가 많다. 이 경우에는 두 가지 선택지가 있는데, 첫째는 각 층간 통신 채널의 대역폭을 줄이는 것이고, 둘째는 각 채널의 대역폭은 유지하되 일부 노드만 층간 통신이 가능한 채널을 제공하는 것이다. 우리는 각각의 경우에 대하여 라우팅 알고리즘을 하나씩 제시한다. 첫 번째 경우에 있어서는 deflection 라우팅 기법을 사용하여 층간 통신의 긴 지연 시간을 극복하고자 하였다. 층간 통신을 균등하게 분배함으로써, 제시된 알고리즘은 개선된 지연 시간을 보이며 라우터 버퍼의 제거를 통한 면적 및 에너지 효율성 또한 얻을 수 있다. 두 번째 경우에서는 층간 통신 채널을 선택하기 위한 몇 가지 규칙을 제시한다. 약간의 라우팅 자유도를 희생함으로써, 제시된 알고리즘은 기존 알고리즘의 가상 채널 요구 조건을 제거하고, 결과적으로는 성능 또는 에너지 효율의 증가를 가져 온다.For decades, advance in semiconductor technology has led us to the era of many-core systems. Today's desktop computers already have multi-core processors, and chips with more than a hundred cores are commercially available. As a communication medium for such a large number of cores, network-on-chip (NoC) has emerged out, and now is being used by many researchers and companies. Adopting NoC for a many-core system incurs many problems, and this thesis tries to solve some of them. The second chapter of this thesis is on mapping and scheduling of tasks on NoC-based CMP architectures. Although mapping on NoC has a number of papers published, our work reveals that selecting communication types between shared memory and message passing can help improve the performance and energy efficiency. Additionally, our framework supports scheduling applications containing backward dependencies with the help of modified modulo scheduling. Evolving the SoCs through 3D stacking makes us face a number of new problems, and the thermal problem coming from increased power density is one of them. In the third chapter of this thesis, we try to mitigate the hotspot problem using DVFS techniques. Assuming that all the routers as well as cores have capabilities to control voltage and frequency individually, we find voltage-frequency pairs for all cores and routers which yields the best performance within the given thermal constraint. The fourth and the fifth chapters of this thesis are from a different aspect. In 3D stacking, inter-layer interconnections are implemented using through-silicon vias (TSV). TSVs usually take much more area than normal wires. Furthermore, they also consume silicon area as well as metal area. For this reason, designers would want to limit the number of TSVs used in their network. To limit the TSV count, there are two options: the first is to reduce the width of each vertical links, and the other is to use fewer vertical links, which results in a partially connected network. We present two routing methodologies for each case. For the network with reduced bandwidth vertical links, we propose using deflection routing to mitigate the long latency of vertical links. By balancing the vertical traffics properly, the algorithm provides improved latency. Also, a large amount of area and energy reduction can be obtained by the removal of router buffers. For partially connected networks, we introduce a set of routing rules for selecting the vertical links. At the expense of sacrificing some amount of routing freedom, the proposed algorithm removes the virtual channel requirement for avoiding deadlock. As a result, the performance, or energy consumption can be reduced at the designer's choice.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Task Mapping and Scheduling 2 1.2 Thermal Management 3 1.3 Routing for 3D Networks 5 Chapter 2 Mapping and Scheduling 9 2.1 Introduction 9 2.2 Motivation 10 2.3 Background 12 2.4 Related Work 16 2.5 Platform Description 17 2.5.1 Architcture Description 17 2.5.2 Energy Model 21 2.5.3 Communication Delay Model 22 2.6 Problem Formulation 23 2.7 Proposed Solution 25 2.7.1 Task and Communication Mapping 27 2.7.2 Communication Type Optimization 31 2.7.3 Design Space Pruning via Pre-evaluation 34 2.7.4 Scheduling 35 2.8 Experimental Results 42 2.8.1 Experiments with Coarse-grained Iterative Modulo Scheduling 42 2.8.2 Comparison with Different Mapping Algorithms 43 2.8.3 Experiments with Overall Algorithms 45 2.8.4 Experiments with Various Local Memory Sizes 47 2.8.5 Experiments with Various Placements of Shared Memory 48 Chapter 3 Thermal Management 50 3.1 Introduction 50 3.2 Background 51 3.2.1 Thermal Modeling 51 3.2.2 Heterogeneity in Thermal Propagation 52 3.3 Motivation and Problem Definition 53 3.4 Related Work 56 3.5 Orchestrated Voltage-Frequency Assignment 56 3.5.1 Individual PI Control Method 56 3.5.2 PI Controlled Weighted-Power Budgeting 57 3.5.3 Performance/Power Estimation 59 3.5.4 Frequency Assignment 62 3.5.5 Algorithm Overview 64 3.5.6 Stability Conditions for PI Controller 65 3.6 Experimental Result 66 3.6.1 Experimental Setup 66 3.6.2 Overall Algorithm Performance 68 3.6.3 Accuracy of the Estimation Model 70 3.6.4 Performance of the Frequency Assignment Algorithm 70 Chapter 4 Routing for Limited Bandwidth 3D NoC 72 4.1 Introduction 72 4.2 Motivation 73 4.3 Background 74 4.4 Related Work 75 4.5 3D Deflection Routing 76 4.5.1 Serialized TSV Model 76 4.5.2 TSV Link Injection/ejection Scheme 78 4.5.3 Deadlock Avoidance 80 4.5.4 Livelock Avoidance 84 4.5.5 Router Architecture: Putting It All Together 86 4.5.6 System Level Consideration 87 4.6 Experimental Results 89 4.6.1 Experimental Setup 89 4.6.2 Results on Synthetic Traffic Patterns 91 4.6.3 Results on Realistic Traffic Patterns 94 4.6.4 Results on Real Application Benchmarks 98 4.6.5 Fairness Issue 103 4.6.6 Area Cost Comparison 104 Chapter 5 Routing for Partially Connected 3D NoC 106 5.1 Introduction 106 5.2 Background 107 5.3 Related Work 109 5.4 Proposed Algorithm 111 5.4.1 Preliminary 112 5.4.2 Routing Algorithm for 3-D Stacked Meshes with Regular Partial Vertical Connections 115 5.4.3 Routing Algorithm for 3-D Stacked Meshes with Irregular Partial Vertical Connections 118 5.4.4 Extension to Heterogeneous Mesh Layers 122 5.5 Experimental Results 126 5.5.1 Experimental Setup 126 5.5.2 Experiments on Synthetic Traffics 128 5.5.3 Experiments on Application Benchmarks 133 5.5.4 Comparison with Reduced Bandwidth Mesh 139 Chapter 6 Conclusion 141 Bibliography 144 초록 163Docto

Exploration architecturale et étude des performances des réseaux sur puce 3D partiellement connectés verticalement

Utilization of the third dimension can lead to a significant reduction in power and average hop-count in Networks- on-Chip (NoC). TSV technology, as the most promising technology in 3D integration, offers short and fast vertical links which copes with the long wire problem in 2D NoCs. Nonetheless, TSVs are huge and their manufacturing process is still immature, which reduces the yield of 3D NoC based SoC. Therefore, Vertically-Partially-Connected 3D-NoC has been introduced to benefit from both 3D technology and high yield. Moreover, Vertically-Partially-Connected 3D-NoC is flexible, due to the fact that the number, placement, and assignment of the vertical links in each layer can be decided based on the limitations and requirements of the design. However, there are challenges to present a feasible and high-performance Vertically-Partially-Connected Mesh-based 3D-NoC due to the removed vertical links between the layers. This thesis addresses the challenges of Vertically-Partially-Connected Mesh-based 3D-NoC: Routing is the major problem of the Vertically-Partially-Connected 3D-NoC. Since some vertical links are removed, some of the routers do not have up or/and down ports. Therefore, there should be a path to send a packet to upper or lower layer which obviously has to be determined by a routing algorithm. The suggested paths should not cause deadlock through the network. To cope with this problem we explain and evaluate a deadlock- and livelock-free routing algorithm called Elevator First. Fundamentally, the NoC performance is affected by both 1) micro-architecture of routers and 2) architecture of interconnection. The router architecture has a significant effect on the performance of NoC, as it is a part of transportation delay. Therefore, the simplicity and efficiency of the design of NoC router micro architecture are the critical issues, especially in Vertically-Partially-Connected 3D-NoC which has already suffered from high average latency due to some removed vertical links. Therefore, we present the design and implementation the micro-architecture of a router which not only exactly and quickly transfers the packets based on the Elevator First routing algorithm, but it also consumes a reasonable amount of area and power. From the architecture point of view, the number and placement of vertical links have a key role in the performance of the Vertically-Partially-Connected Mesh-based 3D-NoC, since they affect the average hop-count and link and buffer utilization in the network. Furthermore, the assignment of the vertical links to the routers which do not have up or/and down port(s) is an important issue which influences the performance of the 3D routers. Therefore, the architectural exploration of Vertically-Partially-Connected Mesh-based 3D-NoC is both important and non-trivial. We define, study, and evaluate the parameters which describe the behavior of the network. The parameters can be helpful to place and assign the vertical links in the layers effectively. Finally, we propose a quadratic-based estimation method to anticipate the saturation threshold of the network's average latency.L'utilisation de la troisième dimension peut entraîner une réduction significative de la puissance et de la latence moyenne du trafic dans les réseaux sur puce (Network-on-Chip). La technologie des vias à travers le substrat (ou Through-Silicon Via) est la technologie la plus prometteuse pour l'intégration 3D, car elle offre des liens verticaux courts qui remédient au problème des longs fils dans les NoCs-2D. Les TSVs sont cependant énormes et les processus de fabrication sont immatures, ce qui réduit le rendement des systèmes sur puce à base de NoC-3D. Par conséquent, l'idée de réseaux sur puce 3D partiellement connectés verticalement a été introduite pour bénéficier de la technologie 3D tout en conservant un haut rendement. En outre, de tels réseaux sont flexibles, car le nombre, l'emplacement et l'affectation des liens verticaux dans chaque couche peuvent être décidés en fonction des exigences de l'application. Cependant, ce type de réseaux pose un certain nombre de défis : Le routage est le problème majeur, car l'élimination de certains liens verticaux fait que l'on ne peut utiliser les algorithmes classiques qui suivent l'ordre des dimensions. Pour répondre à cette question nous expliquons et évaluons un algorithme de routage déterministe appelé “Elevator First”, qui garanti d'une part que si un chemin existe, alors on le trouve, et que d'autre part il n'y aura pas d'interblocages. Fondamentalement, la performance du NoC est affecté par a) la micro architecture des routeurs et b) l'architecture d'interconnexion. L'architecture du routeur a un effet significatif sur la performance du NoC, à cause de la latence qu'il induit. Nous présentons la conception et la mise en œuvre de la micro-architecture d'un routeur à faible latence implantant​​l'algorithme de routage Elevator First, qui consomme une quantité raisonnable de surface et de puissance. Du point de vue de l'architecture, le nombre et le placement des liens verticaux ont un rôle important dans la performance des réseaux 3D partiellement connectés verticalement, car ils affectent le nombre moyen de sauts et le taux d'utilisation des FIFOs dans le réseau. En outre, l'affectation des liens verticaux vers les routeurs qui n'ont pas de ports vers le haut ou/et le bas est une question importante qui influe fortement sur les performances. Par conséquent, l'exploration architecturale des réseaux sur puce 3D partiellement connectés verticalement est importante. Nous définissons, étudions et évaluons des paramètres qui décrivent le comportement du réseau, de manière à déterminer le placement et l'affectation des liens verticaux dans les couches de manière simple et efficace. Nous proposons une méthode d'estimation quadratique visantà anticiper le seuil de saturation basée sur ces paramètres

Développement d'architectures HW/SW tolérantes aux fautes et auto-calibrantes pour les technologies Intégrées 3D

Malgré les avantages de l'intégration 3D, le test, le rendement et la fiabilité des Through-Silicon-Vias (TSVs) restent parmi les plus grands défis pour les systèmes 3D à base de Réseaux-sur-Puce (Network-on-Chip - NoC). Dans cette thèse, une stratégie de test hors-ligne a été proposé pour les interconnections TSV des liens inter-die des NoCs 3D. Pour le TSV Interconnect Built-In Self-Test (TSV-IBIST) on propose une nouvelle stratégie pour générer des vecteurs de test qui permet la détection des fautes structuraux (open et short) et paramétriques (fautes de délaye). Des stratégies de correction des fautes transitoires et permanents sur les TSV sont aussi proposées aux plusieurs niveaux d'abstraction: data link et network. Au niveau data link, des techniques qui utilisent des codes de correction (ECC) et retransmission sont utilisées pour protégé les liens verticales. Des codes de correction sont aussi utilisés pour la protection au niveau network. Les défauts de fabrication ou vieillissement des TSVs sont réparé au niveau data link avec des stratégies à base de redondance et sérialisation. Dans le réseau, les liens inter-die défaillante ne sont pas utilisables et un algorithme de routage tolérant aux fautes est proposé. On peut implémenter des techniques de tolérance aux fautes sur plusieurs niveaux. Les résultats ont montré qu'une stratégie multi-level atteint des très hauts niveaux de fiabilité avec un cout plus bas. Malheureusement, il n'y as pas une solution unique et chaque stratégie a ses avantages et limitations. C'est très difficile d'évaluer tôt dans le design flow les couts et l'impact sur la performance. Donc, une méthodologie d'exploration de la résilience aux fautes est proposée pour les NoC 3D mesh.3D technology promises energy-efficient heterogeneous integrated systems, which may open the way to thousands cores chips. Silicon dies containing processing elements are stacked and connected by vertical wires called Through-Silicon-Vias. In 3D chips, interconnecting an increasing number of processing elements requires a scalable high-performance interconnect solution: the 3D Network-on-Chip. Despite the advantages of 3D integration, testing, reliability and yield remain the major challenges for 3D NoC-based systems. In this thesis, the TSV interconnect test issue is addressed by an off-line Interconnect Built-In Self-Test (IBIST) strategy that detects both structural (i.e. opens, shorts) and parametric faults (i.e. delays and delay due to crosstalk). The IBIST circuitry implements a novel algorithm based on the aggressor-victim scenario and alleviates limitations of existing strategies. The proposed Kth-aggressor fault (KAF) model assumes that the aggressors of a victim TSV are neighboring wires within a distance given by the aggressor order K. Using this model, TSV interconnect tests of inter-die 3D NoC links may be performed for different aggressor order, reducing test times and circuitry complexity. In 3D NoCs, TSV permanent and transient faults can be mitigated at different abstraction levels. In this thesis, several error resilience schemes are proposed at data link and network levels. For transient faults, 3D NoC links can be protected using error correction codes (ECC) and retransmission schemes using error detection (Automatic Retransmission Query) and correction codes (i.e. Hybrid error correction and retransmission).For transients along a source-destination path, ECC codes can be implemented at network level (i.e. Network-level Forward Error Correction). Data link solutions also include TSV repair schemes for faults due to fabrication processes (i.e. TSV-Spare-and-Replace and Configurable Serial Links) and aging (i.e. Interconnect Built-In Self-Repair and Adaptive Serialization) defects. At network-level, the faulty inter-die links of 3D mesh NoCs are repaired by implementing a TSV fault-tolerant routing algorithm. Although single-level solutions can achieve the desired yield / reliability targets, error mitigation can be realized by a combination of approaches at several abstraction levels. To this end, multi-level error resilience strategies have been proposed. Experimental results show that there are cases where this multi-layer strategy pays-off both in terms of cost and performance. Unfortunately, one-fits-all solution does not exist, as each strategy has its advantages and limitations. For system designers, it is very difficult to assess early in the design stages the costs and the impact on performance of error resilience. Therefore, an error resilience exploration (ERX) methodology is proposed for 3D NoCs.SAVOIE-SCD - Bib.électronique (730659901) / SudocGRENOBLE1/INP-Bib.électronique (384210012) / SudocGRENOBLE2/3-Bib.électronique (384219901) / SudocSudocFranceF