PROTEUS: Rule-Based Self-Adaptation in Photonic NoCs for Loss-Aware Co-Management of Laser Power and Performance

TL;DR

PROTEUS is a rule-based self-adaptation framework for photonic NoCs that reduces laser power consumption while improving latency and energy efficiency, balancing multiple performance metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-adaptive approach that optimizes laser power, latency, and energy efficiency in photonic NoCs, addressing limitations of prior methods.

Findings

Achieves up to 24.5% reduction in laser power

Reduces average packet latency by up to 31%

Lowers energy-per-bit by up to 20%

Abstract

The performance of on-chip communication in the state-of-the-art multi-core processors that use the traditional electron-ic NoCs has already become severely energy-constrained. To that end, emerging photonic NoCs (PNoC) are seen as a po-tential solution to improve the energy-efficiency (performance per watt) of on-chip communication. However, existing PNoC designs cannot realize their full potential due to their exces-sive laser power consumption. Prior works that attempt to improve laser power efficiency in PNoCs do not consider all key factors that affect the laser power requirement of PNoCs. Therefore, they cannot yield the desired balance between the reduction in laser power, achieved performance and energy-efficiency in PNoCs. In this paper, we present PROTEUS framework that employs rule-based self-adaptation in PNoCs. Our approach not only reduces the laser power consumption, but also minimizes the average packet latency by opportunis-tically increasing the communication data rate in PNoCs, and thus, yields the desired balance between the laser power re-duction, performance, and energy-efficiency in PNoCs. Our evaluation with PARSEC benchmarks shows that our PROTEUS framework can achieve up to 24.5% less laser power consumption, up to 31% less average packet latency, and up to 20% less energy-per-bit, compared to another laser power management technique from prior work.