Networks-on-Chip Interfacing: NoC-based Systems Networking and Inter-NoC Communication

Abstract

Many- and multi-core Networks-on-Chip (NoC) systems have a large spectrum of applications, and one of these applications is High Performance Computing (HPC). In HPC application, system scalability is one of the important features of a given HPC platform. Two of the factors governing scalability are the interfacing link speed and the ease of deploying additional processing nodes. For NoC-based systems, scalability has two meanings; intra-NoC scalability, which includes partitioning and clustering Processing Elements (PEs) to achieve better performance, and inter-NoC scalability, which includes interfacing with other NoC-based systems via inter-NoC links and creating a newtrok of multiple NoC-based systems. In this paper, we investigate the case of inter-NoC communication between a network of NoC-based systems. By using our simulator, we found out that treating a network of NoC-based systems as a generic case of interfacing yields non-optimal performance. To target the inter-NoC communication performance, we introduce NoC2 , an NoC-based system with an Ethernet communication manager that provides better management for inter-NoC traffic. Current implementations of inter-NoC traffic management handle inter-NoC traffic using software running on top of a dedicated PE, whereas NoC2 is designed so that the software running on cores within the NoC is completely abstracted from inter-NoC traffic management. Experiments show that this kind of abstraction has better inter-NoC communication performance over generic NoC interfaced via Ethernet. Results suggest that NoC2 would perform better when it comes to scaling NoC-based systems by interfacing more NoC-based hardware.