A novel O(n) parallel banker's algorithm for System-on-a-Chip

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel O(n) parallel banker's algorithm (PBA) with a best-case run-time of O(1), reduced from an O(mn/sup 2/) run-time complexity of the original banker's algorithm. We implemented the approach in hardware, which we call PBA unit (PBAU), using Verilog HDL and verified the runtime complexity. PBAU is an intellectual property (IP) block that provides a mechanism of very fast, automatic deadlock avoidance for a multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC, which we predict will be the mainstream of future high performance computing environments). Moreover, our PBA supports multiple-instance multiple resource systems. We demonstrate that PBAU not only avoids deadlock in a few clock cycles (1600/spl times/ faster than the banker's algorithm in software) but also achieves in a particular example a 19% speedup of application execution time over avoiding deadlock in software. Lastly, the MPSoC area overhead due to PBAU is small, under 0.05% in our candidate MPSoC example.