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Costs and benefits of flexibility in spatial division circuit switched networks-on-chip

Published: 08 December 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Although most Network-on-Chip (NoC) designs are based on Packet Switching (PS), the importance of Circuit Switching (CS) should not be underestimated. Many MPSoC executing real-time applications require an underlying communication backbone that can relay messages from one node to another with guaranteed throughput. Compared to PS, CS can provide guaranteed throughput with lower area and power overheads. It is also highly suited for applications where nodes transfer long messages. Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM) can allow more efficient use of available network resources by dividing them among multiple simultaneous transactions. The network developed by Vali [1] has three design variations based on the number of sub-channels, has a predictable connection setup time, and uses CS to provide guaranteed throughput once a connection is established. In this paper we use this network as a basis to study the effect of flexibility based on SDM, on the performance of a CS networks. A network evaluation platform has been developed to configure and evaluate networks with a maximum of 8 sub-networks, with each subnetwork comprising of 1, 2 or 4 sub-channels. We show that under uniform traffic pattern with requests of uniform random bandwidth (BW) requirement, a less flexible network outperforms a network with higher flexibility due to a phenomenon we call 'stray requests'. We conclude this paper by showing that under high network traffic, performance of our flexible networks can be as much as 113% better than HAGAR [2] and Liu's [3] network.

References

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A. Vali, "Design and Implementation of a Multi Channel Circuit-Switched Network-on-Chip," Master's Thesis at ICT, KTH, Stockholm, 2011.
[2]
M. Winter and G. Fettweis, "Guaranteed service virtual channel allocation in NoCs for run-time task scheduling," in DATE Conference, 2011.
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S. Liu, A. Jantsch and Z. Lu, "Parallel probing: Dynamic and constant time setup procedure in circuit switching NoC," in DATE Conference, 2012.
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A. K. Lusala and J. Legat, "A hybrid NoC combining SDM-TDM based circuit-switching with packet-switching for real-time applications," in IEEE 10th International New Circuits and Systems Conference (NEWCAS), 2012.
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A. Leroy, P. Marchal, D. Verkest, A. Shickova, F. Catthoor and F. Robert, "Spatial division multiplexing: a novel approach for guaranteed throughput on NoCs," in Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis, 2005.
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S. Liu, A. Jantsch and Z. Lu, "Analysis and evaluation of Circuit Switched NoC and Packet Switched NoC," in Conference, Digital System Design 2013.
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K.-C. Chang, J.-S. Shen and T.-F. Chen, "Evaluation and design trade-offs between circuit-switched and packet switched NOCs for application-specific SOCs," in Design Automation Conference, 2006.
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M. Deivasigamani, S. Tabatabaei, N. Mustafa, H. Ijaz, H. Aslam, S. Liu and A. Jantsch, "Concept and design of exhaustive-parallel search algorithm for Network-on-Chip," in SOC Conference (SOCC), IEEE International, 2011.
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A. Leroy, D. Milojevic, D. Verkest, F. Robert and F. Catthoor, "Concepts and Implementation of Spatial Division Multiplexing for Guaranteed Throughput in Networks-on-Chip," Computers, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 57, no. 9, pp. 1182--1195, Sept. 2008.
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A. Lusala and J. Legat, "A hybrid NoC combining SDM-based circuit switching with packet switching for real-time applications," in NORCHIP, 2010.
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A. Ejaz, "Enhancement and Evaluation of Multi-Channel Circuit Switched Network on Chip," Masters Thesis at ICT KTH, Stockholm, 2013.
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Cited By

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  • (2019)Improving Static Power Efficiency via Placement of Network Demultiplexer over Control Plane of Router in Multi-NoCsProceedings of the 56th Annual Design Automation Conference 201910.1145/3316781.3322471(1-2)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2019
  • (2019)Distributed SDN architecture for NoC-based many-core SoCsProceedings of the 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip10.1145/3313231.3352361(1-8)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2019
  • (2018)A Power Efficient Crossbar Arbitration in Multi-NoC for Multicast and Broadcast Traffic2018 IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems (iSES) (Formerly iNiS)10.1109/iSES.2018.00060(243-248)Online publication date: Dec-2018
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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NoCArc '13: Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Network on Chip Architectures
    December 2013
    72 pages
    ISBN:9781450323703
    DOI:10.1145/2536522
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 08 December 2013

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    NoCArc '13: Network on Chip Architectures
    December 8, 2013
    California, Davis, USA

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    View all
    • (2019)Improving Static Power Efficiency via Placement of Network Demultiplexer over Control Plane of Router in Multi-NoCsProceedings of the 56th Annual Design Automation Conference 201910.1145/3316781.3322471(1-2)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Distributed SDN architecture for NoC-based many-core SoCsProceedings of the 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip10.1145/3313231.3352361(1-8)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2019
    • (2018)A Power Efficient Crossbar Arbitration in Multi-NoC for Multicast and Broadcast Traffic2018 IEEE International Symposium on Smart Electronic Systems (iSES) (Formerly iNiS)10.1109/iSES.2018.00060(243-248)Online publication date: Dec-2018
    • (2017)SDN-Based Circuit-Switching for Many-Cores2017 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI)10.1109/ISVLSI.2017.74(385-390)Online publication date: Jul-2017
    • (2017)Combined TDM and SDM Circuit Switching NoCs with Dedicated Connection Allocator2017 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI)10.1109/ISVLSI.2017.27(104-109)Online publication date: Jul-2017
    • (2016)A Power Efficient Dual Link Mesh NoC Architecture to Support Nonuniform Traffic Arbitration at Routing LogicProceedings of the 2016 29th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2016 15th International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)10.1109/VLSID.2016.104(69-74)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2016

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