Abstract
Networks-on-chip (NoC) provide a scalable and power-efficient communication infrastructure for different computing chips, ranging from fully customized multi/many-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) to general-purpose chip multiprocessors (CMPs). A common aspect in almost all NoC workloads is the varying size of data transmitted by each transaction: while large data blocks are transferred as multiple-flit packets, a part of the traffic consists of short data segment (control data) that does not even fill a single flit. In conventional NoCs, switch allocator assigns/grants a switch output (and the link connected to it) to a single flit at each cycle, even if the flit is shorter than the link bit-width. In this paper, we propose a novel NoC architecture that enables routers to simultaneously send two short flits on the same link, effectively utilizing the link bandwidth that otherwise would be wasted. To this end, new crossbar, virtual channel (VC), and switch allocator architectures are presented to support parallel short packet forwarding on NoC links. Simulation results using synthetic and realistic workloads show that the proposed architecture improves the NoC performance by up to 24%.
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Momenzadeh, E., Modarressi, M., Mazloumi, A., Daneshtalab, M. (2017). Parallel Forwarding for Efficient Bandwidth Utilization in Networks-on-Chip. In: Knoop, J., Karl, W., Schulz, M., Inoue, K., Pionteck, T. (eds) Architecture of Computing Systems - ARCS 2017. ARCS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10172. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54999-6_12
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