Exploring heterogeneous NoC design space

Hui Zhao, Mahmut Kandemir, Wei Ding, Mary Jane Irwin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) plays a crucial role in designing low cost chip multiprocessors (CMPs) as the number of cores on a chip keeps increasing. However, buffers in NoC routers increase the cost of CMPs in terms of both area and power. Recently, bufferless routers have been proposed to reduce such costs by removing buffers from the routers. However, bufferless routers can provide competitive performance only when network utilization is moderate. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous design that employs both buffered and bufferless routers in the same NoC to achieve high performance at low cost. We evaluate a variety of plans to place buffered and bufferless routers in an NoC based CMP according to performance requirements and power allowances. In order to take full advantage of these heterogeneous NoCs, we also propose novel strategies for buffered-router-aware application thread mapping and a routing algorithm (once the router placement is fixed). Our evaluations show that, by utilizing the techniques we proposed, a heterogeneous NoC does not only achieve performance comparable to that of the NoCs with buffered routers but also reduces buffer costs and energy consumption.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2011 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2011
Pages787-793
Number of pages7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event2011 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2011 - San Jose, CA, United States
Duration: Nov 7 2011Nov 10 2011

Publication series

NameIEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD
ISSN (Print)1092-3152

Other

Other2011 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Jose, CA
Period11/7/1111/10/11

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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