3 research outputs found
Flexible Spare Core Placement in Torus Topology based NoCs and its validation on an FPGA
In the nano-scale era, Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnection paradigm has gained importance to abide by the communication challenges in Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). With increased integration density on CMPs, NoC components namely cores, routers, and links are susceptible to failures.
Therefore, to improve system reliability, there is a need for efficient fault-tolerant techniques that mitigate
permanent faults in NoC based CMPs. There exists several fault-tolerant techniques that address the
permanent faults in application cores while placing the spare cores onto NoC topologies. However, these
techniques are limited to Mesh topology based NoCs. There are few approaches that have realized the
fault-tolerant solutions on an FPGA, but the study on architectural aspects of NoC is limited. This paper
presents the flexible placement of spare core onto Torus topology-based NoC design by considering core
faults and validating it on an FPGA. In the first phase, a mathematical formulation based on Integer Linear
Programming (ILP) and meta-heuristic based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been proposed for the
placement of spare core. In the second phase, we have implemented NoC router addressing scheme, routing
algorithm, run-time fault injection model, and fault-tolerant placement of spare core onto Torus topology
using an FPGA. Experiments have been done by taking different multimedia and synthetic application
benchmarks. This has been done in both static and dynamic simulation environments followed by hardware
implementation. In the static simulation environment, the experimentations are carried out by scaling the
network size and router faults in the network. The results obtained from our approach outperform the
methods such as Fault-tolerant Spare Core Mapping (FSCM), Simulated Annealing (SA), and Genetic
Algorithm (GA) proposed in the literature. For the experiments carried out by scaling the network size,
our proposed methodology shows an average improvement of 18.83%, 4.55%, 12.12% in communication
cost over the approaches FSCM, SA, and GA, respectively. For the experiments carried out by scaling the
router faults in the network, our approach shows an improvement of 34.27%, 26.26%, and 30.41% over the
approaches FSCM, SA, and GA, respectively. For the dynamic simulations, our approach shows an average
improvement of 5.67%, 0.44%, and 3.69%, over the approaches FSCM, SA, and GA, respectively. In the
hardware implementation, our approach shows an average improvement of 5.38%, 7.45%, 27.10% in terms
of application runtime over the approaches SA, GA, and FSCM, respectively. This shows the superiority of
the proposed approach over the approaches presented in the literature.publishedVersio
Flexible Spare Core Placement in Torus Topology based NoCs and its validation on an FPGA
In the nano-scale era, Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnection paradigm has gained importance to abide by the communication challenges in Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). With increased integration density on CMPs, NoC components namely cores, routers, and links are susceptible to failures.
Therefore, to improve system reliability, there is a need for efficient fault-tolerant techniques that mitigate
permanent faults in NoC based CMPs. There exists several fault-tolerant techniques that address the
permanent faults in application cores while placing the spare cores onto NoC topologies. However, these
techniques are limited to Mesh topology based NoCs. There are few approaches that have realized the
fault-tolerant solutions on an FPGA, but the study on architectural aspects of NoC is limited. This paper
presents the flexible placement of spare core onto Torus topology-based NoC design by considering core
faults and validating it on an FPGA. In the first phase, a mathematical formulation based on Integer Linear
Programming (ILP) and meta-heuristic based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been proposed for the
placement of spare core. In the second phase, we have implemented NoC router addressing scheme, routing
algorithm, run-time fault injection model, and fault-tolerant placement of spare core onto Torus topology
using an FPGA. Experiments have been done by taking different multimedia and synthetic application
benchmarks. This has been done in both static and dynamic simulation environments followed by hardware
implementation. In the static simulation environment, the experimentations are carried out by scaling the
network size and router faults in the network. The results obtained from our approach outperform the
methods such as Fault-tolerant Spare Core Mapping (FSCM), Simulated Annealing (SA), and Genetic
Algorithm (GA) proposed in the literature. For the experiments carried out by scaling the network size,
our proposed methodology shows an average improvement of 18.83%, 4.55%, 12.12% in communication
cost over the approaches FSCM, SA, and GA, respectively. For the experiments carried out by scaling the
router faults in the network, our approach shows an improvement of 34.27%, 26.26%, and 30.41% over the
approaches FSCM, SA, and GA, respectively. For the dynamic simulations, our approach shows an average
improvement of 5.67%, 0.44%, and 3.69%, over the approaches FSCM, SA, and GA, respectively. In the
hardware implementation, our approach shows an average improvement of 5.38%, 7.45%, 27.10% in terms
of application runtime over the approaches SA, GA, and FSCM, respectively. This shows the superiority of
the proposed approach over the approaches presented in the literature