A CAM-Free Exascalable HPC Router for Low-Energy Communications

Power consumption is the main hurdle in the race for designing Exascale-capable computing systems which would require deploying millions of computing elements. While this problem is being addressed by designing increasingly more power-efficient processing subsystems, little effort has been put on reducing the power consumption of the interconnection network. This is precisely the objective of this work, in which we study the benefits, in terms of both area and power, of avoiding costly and power-hungry CAM-based routing tables deep-rooted in all current networking technologies. We present our custom-made, FPGA-based router based on a simple, arithmetic routing engine which is shown to be much more power- and area-efficient than even a relatively small 2K-entry routing table which requires as much area and one order of magnitude more power than our router.

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