Orion: a power-performance simulator for interconnection networks

With the prevalence of server blades and systems-ona-chip (SoCs), interconnection networks are becoming an important part of the microprocessor landscape. However, there is limited tool support available for their design. While performance simulators have been built that enable performance estimation while varying network parameters, these cover only one metric of interest in modern designs. System power consumption is increasingly becoming equally, if not more important than performance. It is now critical to get detailed power-performance tradeoff information early in the microarchitectural design cycle. This is especially so as interconnection networks consume a significant fraction of total system power. It is exactly this gap that the work presented in this paper aims to fill. We present Orion1 , a power-performance interconnection network simulator that is capable of providing detailed power characteristics, in addition to performance characteristics, to enable rapid power-per...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Hangsheng Wang, Xinping Zhu, Li-Shiuan Peh, Sharad Malik
• Keywords: Hardware, Interconnection Network, Interconnection Network Simulator, MICRO 2002, Power Models