Efficient Application Specification for Network-on-Chip Exploration

To specify dataflow applications efficiently is one of the greatest challenges facing Network-on-Chip (NoC) simulation and exploration. BTS (Behavior-level Traffic Simulation) was proposed to specify behavior-level applications more efficiently than conventional message-passing programming model does. To alleviate the complexity in parallel programming, BTS has the computation tasks implemented as sequential modules with data shared among them. Also parameterization was proposed in BTS to produce pseudo messages pointing to the shared data, and to fulfill data-driven scheduling. As substitute for the conventional parallel applications, BTS-based ones inherit their computation-models and the underlying scheduling schemes. The pseudo messages are consistent with those in the ancestors in function and size. Then BTS-based applications and conventional ones will produce identical traffic and identical results for NoC simulation. Case studies showed that BTS may boost the application specification by reusing the existing sequential codes, especially domain-specific languages implemented as libraries of sequential sub-routines.