A large-scale nesting ring multi-chip architecture for manycore processor systems

Abstract

The optical network on chip (ONoC) paradigm has emerged as a promising solution to multi-core/many-core processor systems for offering enormous bandwidth and low power consumption. As chip multiprocessors (CMPs) scale to unprecedented numbers of cores, the performance of next-generation CMPs will be bounded by the process yield and power density of single chip. In earlier work we proposed a multi-chip ONoC architecture that scales to large numbers of CMPs and delivers high performance in terms of delay and throughout. Building on that work, in this paper we propose an optimized architecture for integrating a large number of cores into chips with a novel control strategy, including a contention resolution scheme and a resource reservation scheme. The proposed control strategy is crucial to large scale ONoCs, because the resource reservation scheme ensures efficient wavelength allocation for the traffic while the contention management scheme is effective in reducing the impact of contentions. To sustain good performance and energy efficiency of large-scale ONoC, the topology is optimized to reduce the average transmission distance with minimum increase of power consumption. We evaluate the proposed architecture within a 1000-core processor system and compare it with CMesh and several previously proposed topologies with different control strategies. The simulation results show that, our new large-scale architecture can achieve better performance on throughput and delay.