Efficiency and scalability of barrier synchronization on NoC based many-core architectures

Interconnects based on Networks-on-Chip are an appealing solution to address future microprocessor designs where, very likely, hundreds of cores will be connected on a single chip. A fundamental role in highly parallelized applications running on many-core architectures will be played by barrier primitives used to synchronize the execution of parallel processes. This paper focuses on the analysis of the efficiency and scalability of different barrier implementations in many-core architectures based on NoCs. Several message passing barrier implementations based on four algorithms (all-to-all, master-slave, butterfly and tree) have been implemented and evaluated for a single-chip target architecture composed of a variable number of cores (from 4 to 128) and different network topologies (mesh, torus, ring, clustered-ring and fat-tree). Using a cycle-accurate simulator, we show the scalability of each barrier for every NoC topology, analyzing and comparing theoretical with real behaviors. We observed that some barrier algorithms, when implemented in hardware or software, show a different scaling behavior with respect to those theoretically expected. We evaluate the efficiency of each combination topology-barrier, demonstrating that, in many cases, simple network topologies can be more efficient than complex and highly connected topologies.