Inter-NoC Communication and Interfacing

Abstract

Networks-on-Chip (NoC) scalability is a vital characteristic for a large application spectrum of many- and multi-core NoC-based systems. One of these applications is High Performance Computing (HPC). An HPC system scalability is achieved by expanding the system processing power, which can be extended physically by adding additional processing resources, either on-board or off-board. For both types, two of the factors governing scalability are the interfacing link speed and the ease of deploying additional processing nodes. In many- and multi-core NoC systems literature, two topics have recently been researched, NoC clustering and NoC simulation. NoC clustering investigates grouping Processing Elements (PEs) based on common characteristics between them, like spatial locality or communication patterns. Research showed that NoC clustering enhances the performance and the load balancing. Furthermore, it allows the scalability of the NoC grid. The other topic, NoC simulation, provides tools for early evaluation of NoC systems. This allows easy investigation of NoC-based systems with large number of PEs. Plenty of research has been done in both topics separately.