Title :
SAMNoC: A Novel Optical Network-on-Chip for Energy-Efficient Memory Access
Author :
Weiwei Fu ; Mingmin Yuan ; Tianzhou Chen ; Li Liu ; Minghui Wu
Author_Institution :
Coll. of Comput. Sci., Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou, China
Abstract :
Thanks to recent progresses in optical device integration, nanophotonic interconnect can be applied to build optical network-on-chip (ONoC) for providing connectivity among increasing number of cores and memory modules in future many-core processors. However, there are still challenges in architecture and protocol design of ONoC for massive parallel memory accesses in CMPs, The on-chip memory access traffic exhibits heterogeneity for different nodes, i.e. Cores and memory controllers and different memory packets. This paper analyses on-chip communication characteristics and proposes a novel ONoC named SAMNoC. In SAMNoC, memory controllers are able to make self-arbitration for network resources to support node heterogeneity, and different packets are transmitted in dedicated sub-networks to optimize memory traffic. The memory request sub-network applies efficient global communication via slot and coded tokens to exploit bank level parallelism and the response sub-network can eliminate network bottleneck and process memory transactions quickly when the data is ready. Simulation results on real applications show that our SAMNoC can significantly improve memory performance, compared with other bus-based ONoC alternatives, with lower static power consumption and less number of optical waveguides and micro-rings.
Keywords :
integrated optoelectronics; network-on-chip; CMPs; ONoC; SAMNoC; bank level parallelism; bus-based ONoC; coded tokens; energy-efficient memory access; many-core processors; massive parallel memory accesses; memory controllers; memory modules; memory packets; memory request sub-network; microrings; nanophotonic interconnect; network resources; node heterogeneity; on-chip communication characteristics; on-chip memory access traffic; optical device integration; optical network-on-chip; optical waveguides; process memory transactions; protocol design; static power consumption; Optical buffering; Optical fiber networks; Optical interconnections; Optical packet switching; Optical waveguides; Random access memory; System-on-chip; Memory access traffic; Optical network-on-chip; Self-arbitration;
Conference_Titel :
Embedded Multicore/Manycore SoCs (MCSoc), 2014 IEEE 8th International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Aizu-Wakamatsu
DOI :
10.1109/MCSoC.2014.34