Highly Fault-tolerant NoC Routing with Application-aware Congestion Management

Silicon devices are becoming less and less reliable as technology moves to smaller feature sizes. As a result, digital systems are increasingly likely to experience permanent failures during their lifetime. To overcome this problem, networks-on-chip (NoCs) should be designed to, not only fulfill performance requirements, but also be robust to many fault occurrences. This paper proposes a fault- and application-aware routing framework called FATE: it leverages the diversity of communication patterns in applications for highly faulty NoCs to reduce congestion during execution. To this end, FATE estimates routing demands in applications to balance traffic load among the available resources. We propose a set of novel route-enabling rules that greatly reduce the search for deadlock-free, maximallyconnected routes for any faulty 2D mesh topology, by preventing early on the exploration of routing configuration options that lead eventually to unviable solutions. Our experimental results sh...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: NOCS
• Authors: Doowon Lee, Ritesh Parikh, Valeria Bertacco
• Keywords: Computer Networks, NOCS 2015