Regional congestion awareness for load balance in networks-on-chip

By Paul V. Gratz, Boris Grot, S. Keckler. 2008 IEEE 14th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, 2008

428 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Interconnection networks-on-chip (NOCs) are rapidly replacing other forms of interconnect in chip multiprocessors and system-on-chip designs. Existing interconnection networks use either oblivious or adaptive routing algorithms to determine the route taken by a packet to its destination. Despite somewhat higher implementation complexity, adaptive routing enjoys better fault tolerance characteristics, increases network throughput, and decreases latency compared to oblivious policies when faced with non-uniform or bursty traffic. However, adaptive routing can hurt performance by disturbing any inherent global load balance through greedy local decisions. To improve load balance in adapting routing, we propose Regional Congestion Awareness (RCA), a lightweight technique to improve global network balance. Instead of relying solely on local congestion information, RCA informs the routing policy of congestion in parts of the network beyond adjacent routers. Our experiments show that RCA matches or exceeds the performance of conventional adaptive routing across all workloads examined, with a 16% average and 71% maximum latency reduction on SPLASH-2 benchmarks running on a 49-core CMP. Compared to a baseline adaptive router, RCA incurs a negligible logic and modest wiring overhead.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0eadb23fd9a83b28c6c861e8a40620b3a832ce50

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

A case for bufferless routing in on-chip networks (2009, background): “Our bufferless network design lacks many functionalities that have been developed for buffered networks, including support for starvation freedom/avoidance, QoS and different traffic service classes, fault tolerance in the presence of faulty links/routers, congestion awareness [21], and energy manag”