Title
A Generic Implementation of Barriers Using Optical Interconnects
Abstract
Barriers have long been recognized as important performance-critical constructs in parallel applications. As a consequence, researchers have proposed fast implementations of barriers in both traditional electrical networks and in non-conventional networks such as optical NoCs. We prove in this paper that current protocols for barriers in optical NoCs are simplistic and cannot be trivially extended to accommodate for normal events that arise in regular operation such as presence of multiple applications, context switches, thread migrations, and variability in the number of active threads. We propose two generic protocols for barriers that can take all such cases into account, are fast, and try to minimize the number of messages sent over the NoC. One of these protocols is a centralized protocol (suitable for less cores), and the other is a distributed protocol, which is scalable. For a suite of standard benchmarks we found the latter to yield a mean speedup of 30.77% over a design that uses a hardware tree barrier. Our barrier implementation per se is roughly 2X and 20X faster than prior implementations that use transmission lines and electrical links respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/VLSID.2016.16
2016 29th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2016 15th International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)
Keywords
Field
DocType
optical barriers,fundamental limits,fast barriers
Suite,Computer science,Computer network,Thread (computing),Electric power transmission,Electronic engineering,Implementation,Optical performance monitoring,Context switch,Speedup,Scalability,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1063-9667
2
0.38
References 
Authors
10
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sandeep Chandran173.18
Eldhose Peter2384.24
Preeti Ranjan Panda378689.40
Smruti R. Sarangi444741.94