Scaling the Performance of Tiled Processor Architectures with On-Chip-Network Topology

The trend in wire delays due to resistance is becoming a significant problem for microprocessor designers, forcing radically new tiled microprocessor architecture designs. This type of architecture will necessarily incorporate on-chip networks topology. This paper examines a few of the possible on-chip network topology in the context of tiled processor architectures. Firstly, by investigating some proposed tiled processor architecture, we observe that the on chip network interconnecting is the critical design point in the architectures. After that, we discuss the candidate topologies of on-chip network topology that satisfy these properties. Finally, a detailed experimental evaluation of these networks topology is presented to highlight the scalability and performance of these tiled processor architectures. Results show that we can achieve performance improvement by modifying basic mesh appropriately according to the granularity of the tile within technology restrictions.

[1]  Niraj K. Jha,et al.  Express virtual channels: towards the ideal interconnection fabric , 2007, ISCA '07.

[2]  Milos D. Ercegovac,et al.  The Art of Deception: Adaptive Precision Reduction for Area Efficient Physics Acceleration , 2007, 40th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2007).

[3]  Karthikeyan Sankaralingam,et al.  A design space evaluation of grid processor architectures , 2001, MICRO.

[4]  Simha Sethumadhavan,et al.  Distributed Microarchitectural Protocols in the TRIPS Prototype Processor , 2006, 2006 39th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'06).

[5]  Henry Hoffmann,et al.  The Raw Microprocessor: A Computational Fabric for Software Circuits and General-Purpose Programs , 2002, IEEE Micro.

[6]  Sharad Malik,et al.  Power-driven design of router microarchitectures in on-chip networks , 2003, Proceedings. 36th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2003. MICRO-36..

[7]  Xia Chen,et al.  A spatial path scheduling algorithm for EDGE architectures , 2006, ASPLOS XII.

[8]  N.K. Jha,et al.  Toward Ideal On-Chip Communication Using Express Virtual Channels , 2008, IEEE Micro.

[9]  S. Winkel Optimal versus Heuristic Global Code Scheduling , 2007, 40th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2007).

[10]  Doug Matzke,et al.  Will Physical Scalability Sabotage Performance Gains? , 1997, Computer.

[11]  Aaron Smith,et al.  Compiling for EDGE architectures , 2006, International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO'06).

[12]  Ken Mai,et al.  The future of wires , 2001, Proc. IEEE.

[13]  Karthikeyan Sankaralingam,et al.  Implementation and Evaluation of a Dynamically Routed Processor Operand Network , 2007, First International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS'07).

[14]  William J. Dally,et al.  Smart Memories: a modular reconfigurable architecture , 2000, ISCA '00.

[15]  Sharad Malik,et al.  Power-driven Design of Router Microarchitectures in On-chip Networks , 2003, MICRO.