Design and evaluation of a hierarchical on-chip interconnect for next-generation CMPs

Performance and power consumption of an on-chip interconnect that forms the backbone of Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs), are directly influenced by the underlying network topology. Both these parameters can also be optimized by application induced communication locality since applications mapped on a large CMP system will benefit from clustered communication, where data is placed in cache banks closer to the cores accessing it. Thus, in this paper, we design a hierarchical network topology that takes advantage of such communication locality. The two-tier hierarchical topology consists of local networks that are connected via a global network. The local network is a simple, high-bandwidth, low-power shared bus fabric, and the global network is a low-radix mesh. The key insight that enables the hybrid topology is that most communication in CMP applications can be limited to the local network, and thus, using a fast, low-power bus to handle local communication will improve both packet latenc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Reetuparna Das, Soumya Eachempati, Asit K. Mishra, Narayanan Vijaykrishnan, Chita R. Das
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, Hierarchical Network Topology, HPCA 2009, Hybrid Topology, Two-tier Hierarchical Topology