Extending the performance of hybrid NoCs beyond the limitations of network heterogeneity

To meet the performance and scalability demands of the fast-paced technological growth towards exascale and Big-Data processing with the performance bottleneck of conventional metal based interconnects (wireline), alternative interconnect fabrics such as inhomogeneous three-dimensional integrated Network-on-Chip (3D NoC) and hybrid wired-wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) have emanated as a cost-effective solution for emerging System-on-Chip (SoC) design. However, these interconnects trade-off optimized performance for cost by restricting the number of area and power hungry 3D routers and wireless nodes. Moreover, the non-uniform distributed traffic in chip multiprocessor (CMP) demands an on-chip communication infrastructure which can avoid congestion under high traffic conditions while possessing minimal pipeline delay at low-load conditions. To this end, in this paper, we propose a low-latency adaptive router with a low-complexity single-cycle bypassing mechanism to alleviate the performance degradation due to the slow 2D routers in such emerging hybrid NoCs. The proposed router transmits a flit using dimension-ordered routing (DoR) in the bypass datapath at low-loads. When the output port required for intra-dimension bypassing is not available, the packet is routed adaptively to avoid congestion. The router also has a simplified virtual channel allocation (VA) scheme that yields a non-speculative low-latency pipeline. By combining the low-complexity bypassing technique with adaptive routing, the proposed router is able balance the traffic in hybrid NoCs to achieve low-latency communication under various traffic loads. Simulation shows that, the proposed router can reduce applications’ execution time by an average of 16.9% compared to low-latency routers such as SWIFT. By reducing the latency between 2D routers (or wired nodes) and 3D routers (or wireless nodes) the proposed router can improve performance efficiency in terms of average packet delay by an average of 45% (or 50%) in 3D NoCs (or WiNoCs)

Performance evaluation of different routing algorithms in network on chip

Network on Chip (NoC) is one of the efficient on-chip communication architecture for System on Chip (SoC) where a large number of computational and storage blocks are integrated on a single chip. NoCs have tackled the disadvantages of SoCs as well as they are scalable. But an efficient routing algorithm can enhance the performance of NoC. In one chapter of the thesis three different types of routing algorithms are compared i.e. XY, OE, and DyAD. XY routing algorithm is a distributed deterministic algorithm. Odd-Even (OE) routing algorithm is distributed adaptive routing algorithm with deadlock-free ability. DyAD is a smart routing algorithm which combines the features of both deterministic and adaptive routing. In another chapter of thesis three different types of deadlock free routing algorithms are compared i.e. one deterministic routing (XY routing algorithm), three partially adaptive routing (West first, North last and Negative first) and two adaptive routing (DyXY, OE) are being compared with % of load for various traffic patterns. In another chapter of thesis, a fault tolerant algorithm is described and its performance is compared with all the deadlock free routing algorithms in a NoC having link faults and node faults. All these simulation is done in NIRGAM 2.1 simulator which is a cycle accurate systemC based simulator

Embedded dynamic programming networks for networks-on-chip

PhD ThesisRelentless technology downscaling and recent technological advancements in three dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) provide a promising prospect to realize heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) and homogeneous chip multiprocessor (CMP) based on the networks-onchip (NoCs) paradigm with augmented scalability, modularity and performance. In many cases in such systems, scheduling and managing communication resources are the major design and implementation challenges instead of the computing resources. Past research efforts were mainly focused on complex design-time or simple heuristic run-time approaches to deal with the on-chip network resource management with only local or partial information about the network. This could yield poor communication resource utilizations and amortize the benefits of the emerging technologies and design methods. Thus, the provision for efficient run-time resource management in large-scale on-chip systems becomes critical. This thesis proposes a design methodology for a novel run-time resource management infrastructure that can be realized efficiently using a distributed architecture, which closely couples with the distributed NoC infrastructure. The proposed infrastructure exploits the global information and status of the network to optimize and manage the on-chip communication resources at run-time. There are four major contributions in this thesis. First, it presents a novel deadlock detection method that utilizes run-time transitive closure (TC) computation to discover the existence of deadlock-equivalence sets, which imply loops of requests in NoCs. This detection scheme, TC-network, guarantees the discovery of all true-deadlocks without false alarms in contrast to state-of-the-art approximation and heuristic approaches. Second, it investigates the advantages of implementing future on-chip systems using three dimensional (3D) integration and presents the design, fabrication and testing results of a TC-network implemented in a fully stacked three-layer 3D architecture using a through-silicon via (TSV) complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Testing results demonstrate the effectiveness of such a TC-network for deadlock detection with minimal computational delay in a large-scale network. Third, it introduces an adaptive strategy to effectively diffuse heat throughout the three dimensional network-on-chip (3D-NoC) geometry. This strategy employs a dynamic programming technique to select and optimize the direction of data manoeuvre in NoC. It leads to a tool, which is based on the accurate HotSpot thermal model and SystemC cycle accurate model, to simulate the thermal system and evaluate the proposed approach. Fourth, it presents a new dynamic programming-based run-time thermal management (DPRTM) system, including reactive and proactive schemes, to effectively diffuse heat throughout NoC-based CMPs by routing packets through the coolest paths, when the temperature does not exceed chip’s thermal limit. When the thermal limit is exceeded, throttling is employed to mitigate heat in the chip and DPRTM changes its course to avoid throttled paths and to minimize the impact of throttling on chip performance. This thesis enables a new avenue to explore a novel run-time resource management infrastructure for NoCs, in which new methodologies and concepts are proposed to enhance the on-chip networks for future large-scale 3D integration.Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR)

A comparative study of arbitration algorithms for the Alpha 21364 pipelined router

Interconnection networks usually consist of a fabric of interconnected routers, which receive packets arriving at their input ports and forward them to appropriate output ports. Unfortunately, network packets moving through these routers are often delayed due to conflicting demand for resources, such as output ports or buffer space. Hence, routers typically employ arbiters that resolve conflicting resource demands to maximize the number of matches between packets waiting at input ports and free output ports. Efficient design and implementation of the algorithm running on these arbiters is critical to maximize network performance.This paper proposes a new arbitration algorithm called SPAA (Simple Pipelined Arbitration Algorithm), which is implemented in the Alpha 21364 processor's on-chip router pipeline. Simulation results show that SPAA significantly outperforms two earlier well-known arbitration algorithms: PIM (Parallel Iterative Matching) and WFA (Wave-Front Arbiter) implemented in the SGI Spider switch. SPAA outperforms PIM and WFA because SPAA exhibits matching capabilities similar to PIM and WFA under realistic conditions when many output ports are busy, incurs fewer clock cycles to perform the arbitration, and can be pipelined effectively. Additionally, we propose a new prioritization policy called the Rotary Rule, which prevents the network's adverse performance degradation from saturation at high network loads by prioritizing packets already in the network over new packets generated by caches or memory.Mukherjee, S.; Silla Jiménez, F.; Bannon, P.; Emer, J.; Lang, S.; Webb, D. (2002). A comparative study of arbitration algorithms for the Alpha 21364 pipelined router. ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 37(10):223-234. doi:10.1145/605432.605421S223234371

Application-aware deadlock-free oblivious routing

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-71).Systems that can be integrated on a single silicon die have become larger and increasingly complex, and wire designs as communication mechanisms for these systems on chip (SoC) have shown to be a limiting factor in their performance. As an approach to remove the limitation of communication and to overcome wire delays, interconnection networks or Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have emerged. NoC architectures enable faster data communication between components and are more scalable. In designing NoC systems, there are three key issues; the topology, which directly depends on packaging technology and manufacturing costs, dictates the throughput and latency bounds of the network; the flit control protocol, which establishes how the network resources are allocated to packets exchanged between components; and finally, the routing algorithm, which aims at optimizing network performance for some topology and flow control protocol by selecting appropriate paths for those packets. Since the routing algorithm sits on top of the other layers of design, it is critical that routing is done in a matter that makes good usage of the resources of the network. Two main approaches to routing, oblivious and adaptive, have been followed in creating routing algorithms for these systems. Each approach has its pros and cons; oblivious routing, as opposite to adaptive routing, uses no network state information in determining routes at the cost of lower performance on certain applications, but has been widely used because of its simpler hardware requirements.(cont.) This thesis examines oblivious routing schemes for NoC architectures. It introduces various non-minimal, oblivious routing algorithms that globally allocate network bandwidth for a given application when estimated bandwidths for data transfers are provided, while ensuring deadlock freedom with no significant additional hardware. The work presents and evaluates these oblivious routing algorithms which attempt to minimize the maximum channel load (MCL) across all network links in an effort to maximize application throughput. Simulation results from popular synthetic benchmarks and concrete applications, such as an H.264 decoder, show that it is possible to achieve better performance than traditional deterministic and oblivious routing schemes.by Michel A. Kinsy.S.M

On the design of a high-performance adaptive router for CC-NUMA multiprocessors

Copyright © 2003 IEEEThis work presents the design and evaluation of an adaptive packet router aimed at supporting CC-NUMA traffic. We exploit a simple and efficient packet injection mechanism to avoid deadlock, which leads to a fully adaptive routing by employing only three virtual channels. In addition, we selectively use output buffers for implementing the most utilized virtual paths in order to reduce head-of-line blocking. The careful implementation of these features has resulted in a good trade off between network performance and hardware cost. The outcome of this research is a High-Performance Adaptive Router (HPAR), which adequately balances the needs of parallel applications: minimal network latency at low loads and high throughput at heavy loads. The paper includes an evaluation process in which HPAR is compared with other adaptive routers using FIFO input buffering, with or without additional virtual channels to reduce head-of-line blocking. This evaluation contemplates both the VLSI costs of each router and their performance under synthetic and real application workloads. To make the comparison fair, all the routers use the same efficient deadlock avoidance mechanism. In all the experiments, HPAR exhibited the best response among all the routers tested. The throughput gains ranged from 10 percent to 40 percent in respect to its most direct rival, which employs more hardware resources. Other results shown that HPAR achieves up to 83 percent of its theoretical maximum throughput under random traffic and up to 70 percent when running real applications. Moreover, the observed packet latencies were comparable to those exhibited by simpler routers. Therefore, HPAR can be considered as a suitable candidate to implement packet interchange in next generations of CC-NUMA multiprocessors.Valentín Puente, José-Ángel Gregorio, Ramón Beivide, and Cruz Iz

Bandwidth-sensitive oblivious routing

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-83).Traditional oblivious routing algorithms either do not take into account the bandwidth demand, or assume that each flow has its own private channel to guarantee deadlock freedom. Though adaptive routing schemes can react to varying network traffic, they require complicated router designs. In this thesis, we present a polynomial-time heuristic routing algorithm that takes bandwidth requirements of each flow into account to minimize maximum channel load. The heuristic algorithm has two variants. The first one produces a deadlock-free route. The second one produces a minimal route, and is deadlock-free with two or more virtual channels assuming proper VC allocation. Both routing algorithms are oblivious, and need only simple router designs. The performance of each bandwidth-sensitive routing algorithm is evaluated against dimension-order routing and against the other on a number of benchmarks.by Tina Wen.M.Eng