Design of a Near-Ideal Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Network-on-Chip-Based Multicores

TL;DR

This paper introduces Hermes, a fault-tolerant routing algorithm for Network-on-Chip-based multicores that maintains high throughput and robustness despite increasing faulty links, ensuring reliable chip operation.

Contribution

Hermes is a novel hybrid routing algorithm that combines load-balancing and preconfigured escape paths to enhance fault tolerance and performance in NoC-based multicores.

Findings

Hermes improves network throughput by up to 3x over existing methods.

Hermes gracefully degrades performance as faulty links increase.

Hermes effectively detects network partitions caused by dense faults.

Abstract

With relentless CMOS technology downsizing Networks-on-Chips (NoCs) are inescapably experiencing escalating susceptibility to wearout and reduced reliability. While faults in processors and memories may be masked via redundancy, or mitigated via techniques such as task migration, NoCs are especially vulnerable to hardware faults as a single link breakdown may cause inter-tile communication to halt indefinitely, rendering the whole multicore chip inoperable. As such, NoCs impose the risk of becoming the pivotal point of failure in chip multicores that utilize them. Aiming towards seamless NoC operation in the presence of faulty links we propose Hermes, a near-ideal fault-tolerant routing algorithm that meets the objectives of exhibiting high levels of robustness, operating in a distributed mode, guaranteeing freedom from deadlocks, and evening-out traffic, among many. Hermes is a limited-overhead deadlock-free hybrid routing algorithm, utilizing load-balancing routing on fault-free paths to sustain high-throughput, while providing pre-reconfigured escape path selection in the vicinity of faults. Under such online mechanisms, Hermes's performance degrades gracefully with increasing faulty link counts, a crucially desirable response lacking in prior-art. Additionally, Hermes identifies non-communicating network partitions in scenarios where faulty links are topologically densely distributed such that packets being routed to physically isolated regions cause no network stagnation due to indefinite chained blockages starting at sub-network boundaries. An extensive experimental evaluation, including utilizing traffic workloads gathered from full-system chip multi-processor simulations, shows that Hermes improves network throughput by up to $3\times$ when compared against the state-of-the-art. Further, hardware synthesis results prove Hermes's efficacy.