Energy-Efficient Deflection-based On-chip Networks: Topology, Routing, Flow Control

TL;DR

This paper reviews energy-efficient on-chip network designs, focusing on bufferless and minimally-buffered routers, and proposes hierarchical bufferless architectures to improve performance and energy efficiency across varying network loads.

Contribution

It introduces hierarchical bufferless interconnects and analyzes tradeoffs, enhancing on-chip network performance and energy efficiency under different traffic conditions.

Findings

Hierarchical bufferless design reduces hop count and improves performance.

Limited buffering decreases deflections and energy consumption.

Proposed architectures outperform traditional bufferless routers at high loads.

Abstract

As the number of cores scales to tens and hundreds, the energy consumption of routers across various types of on-chip networks in chip muiltiprocessors (CMPs) increases significantly. A major source of this energy consumption comes from the input buffers inside Network-on-Chip (NoC) routers, which are traditionally designed to maximize performance. To mitigate this high energy cost, many works propose bufferless router designs that utilize deflection routing to resolve port contention. While this approach is able to maintain high performance relative to its buffered counterparts at low network traffic, the bufferless router design suffers performance degradation under high network load. In order to maintain high performance and energy efficiency under both low and high network loads, this chapter discusses critical drawbacks of traditional bufferless designs and describes recent research works focusing on two major modifications to improve the overall performance of the traditional bufferless network-on-chip design. The first modification is a minimally-buffered design that introduces limited buffering inside critical parts of the on-chip network in order to reduce the number of deflections. The second modification is a hierarchical bufferless interconnect design that aims to further improve performance by limiting the number of hops each packet needs to travel while in the network. In both approaches, we discuss design tradeoffs and provide evaluation results based on common CMP configurations with various network topologies to show the effectiveness of each proposal.