Evaluation of a Connectionless NoC for a Real-Time Distributed Shared Memory Many-Core System

Rutgers, Jochem H. and Bekooij, Marco J.G. and Smit, Gerard J.M. (2012) Evaluation of a Connectionless NoC for a Real-Time Distributed Shared Memory Many-Core System. In: 15th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design, DSD 2012, 5-8 September 2012, Çeşme, Izmir, Turkey.

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Abstract:	Real-time embedded systems like smartphones tend to comprise an ever increasing number of processing cores. For scalability and the need for guaranteed performance, the use of a connection-oriented network-on-chip (NoC) is advocated. Furthermore, a distributed shared memory architecture is preferred as it simplifies software development for a multi-core system. In this paper, experimental evidence is provided, showing that replacing a connection-oriented NoC by a connectionless one in a distributed shared memory system reduces the hardware costs and improves the performance. We observed that our FPGA could only support an 8-core system with a connection-oriented NoC. We exchanged the NoC with our tree-shaped, connectionless network and a ring, allowing a 32- core system in the same FPGA, mainly because of a reduced number of physical connections. Although the analytical worst-case performance slightly decreased, measurements show that the latency of latency-critical memory reads was reduced by 52% on average.
Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item
Copyright:	© 2012 IEEE
Faculty:	Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS)
Research Group:	Computer Architecture for Embedded Systems (CAES)
Link to this item:	http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/81381
Official URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/DSD.2012.54
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