The University of Southampton

Rapid Evaluation of Real and Shared-memory based Applications Using a Fast and High-level NoC Simulator - Event

Date:
2nd of May, 2018  @  13:00 - 14:00
Venue:
New Mountbatten (53) - 4025
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Event details

Network­-on-­Chip (NoC) architectures emerged as a viable solution for the design of manycore embedded systems of the next generation. While bringing new opportunities and effective energy­/performance trade­offs, they also introduce new challenges: the design of NoC based systems involves several aspects, such as the partitioning and mapping of the application to the cores, the selection of an appropriate interconnection topology, together with an appropriate routing scheme for dispatching the packets among the nodes. The assessment of NoC based systems by performing a low-level (e.g., RTL) simulation evaluation and/or a full system simulation of the whole NoC architecture, is an extremely time-consuming approach that makes unfeasible an exhaustive exploration of all the design alternatives. High level cycle-accurate NoC simulators are widely used to quickly get an estimation of the target requirements/objectives. However, they rely on the use of synthetic traffic patterns, characterized by specific statistical properties only (e.g., packet injection rate) and do not accurately model other important aspects of real traffic scenarios. To overcome such limitations, different benchmark suites (e.g., PARSEC, SPLASH) were proposed with the aim of including a set of applications representative of new emerging workloads for massively parallel architectures. Nevertheless, they still assume a traditional shared memory mechanism, while a message passing mechanism based on the direct exchange of data packets between nodes would probably be a more appropriate and scalable choice for next generation NoCs. This talk describes the experience and the challenges of developing an entire design flow that, starting from a single and slow traditional shared-memory full system simulation, allows a fast and multi-objective evaluation of real applications on several different NoCs using message passing.
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