Thermal-Aware Application Mapping Strategy for Network-on-Chip Based System Design
Kanchan Manna, Priyajit Mukherjee, Santanu Chattopadhyay, Indranil Sengupta · IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2017
Rapid progress in technology scaling makes transistors smaller and faster over successive generations, and consequently core count in a system gets increased. However, transistor power consumption no longer scales commensurately. Increased power density calls for better thermal safety of the multi-core systems, in which a flexible and scalable packet-switched architecture - Network-on-Chip (NoC) - is commonly used for communication among the cores. This paper proposes a strategy to increase the thermal safety of NoC-based systems by a graceful decrease in communication cost and an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation to deal with the problem. To overcome huge computational overhead of ILP, another solution strategy, based on meta-heuristic technique, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is also proposed. Several innovative augmentations have been introduced into the basic PSO to generate better quality solutions. A thermal-aware mapping heuristic is proposed to generate some intelligent solutions, which become a part of the initial population in the PSO. A trade-off has been established between communication cost and peak temperature of the die. Experiments on Big data and Graph analytical workloads are reported. The results obtained are better than those of many contemporary approaches, reported in the literature.