An Efficient Multicast Router using Shared-Buffer with Packet Merging for Dataflow Architecture

Dataflow architecture has native advantages in achieving high instruction parallelism and power efficiency for today’s emerging applications such as high performance computing and deep neural network. For the dataflow computing, the execution of instructions is driven by data, so the data transfer efficiency of the network on chip (NoC) is a key factor affecting performance. In the NoC, the latest router uses the multicast routing scheme and output buffer structure to improve network transfer efficiency. However, the effective utilization rate of the router’s buffer is low due to the multicast transfer characteristics and unbalanced network load. This observation motivates us to design MRSB, a router architecture that effectively improves buffer utilization by allowing to share data and buffer resources among input ports. As the multicast packet is continuously split during transferring, the effective bandwidth utilization of the packet decreases. Packets with small size waste more buffer cell space, so we expanded packet merging based on MRSB according to the bandwidth occupied by different types of packets. For our experimental workloads, experimental results show that MRSB is 221.48% higher effective buffer utilization and 32.98% less latency than a state-of-the-art router with 31.39% smaller area and 29.14% lower power. The performance of the dataflow accelerator using MRSB is improved by 25.61%, and the average energy of experimental workloads is reduced by 24.27%.