Title
Aérgia: exploiting packet latency slack in on-chip networks
Abstract
Traditional Network-on-Chips (NoCs) employ simple arbitration strategies, such as round-robin or oldest-first, to decide which packets should be prioritized in the network. This is counter-intuitive since different packets can have very different effects on system performance due to, e.g., different level of memory-level parallelism (MLP) of applications. Certain packets may be performance-critical because they cause the processor to stall, whereas others may be delayed for a number of cycles with no effect on application-level performance as their latencies are hidden by other outstanding packets'latencies. In this paper, we define slack as a key measure that characterizes the relative importance of a packet. Specifically, the slack of a packet is the number of cycles the packet can be delayed in the network with no effect on execution time. This paper proposes new router prioritization policies that exploit the available slack of interfering packets in order to accelerate performance-critical packets and thus improve overall system performance. When two packets interfere with each other in a router, the packet with the lower slack value is prioritized. We describe mechanisms to estimate slack, prevent starvation, and combine slack-based prioritization with other recently proposed application-aware prioritization mechanisms. We evaluate slack-based prioritization policies on a 64-core CMP with an 8x8 mesh NoC using a suite of 35 diverse applications. For a representative set of case studies, our proposed policy increases average system throughput by 21.0% over the commonlyused round-robin policy. Averaged over 56 randomly-generated multiprogrammed workload mixes, the proposed policy improves system throughput by 10.3%, while also reducing application-level unfairness by 30.8%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1815961.1815976
Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
network on chip,multi core,arbitration,chip,system performance,memory level parallelism
Latency (engineering),Computer science,Workload,Parallel computing,Network packet,Exploit,Real-time computing,Least slack time scheduling,Router,Throughput,Multi-core processor,Distributed computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
38
3
0163-5964
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
73
1.75
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Reetuparna Das1111747.07
Onur Mutlu29446357.40
Thomas Moscibroda34047200.40
Chita R. Das4104645.21