OpSAVE: Eviction Based Scheme for Efficient Optical Network-on-Chip

Abstract

For on-chip networks, nanophotonics has been considered a strong alternative owing to its high speed (due to low latency) and high bandwidth (due to wavelength division multiplexing). However, the major hurdle in the adoption of nanophotonic-based on-chip networks is their high static power consumption. Various proposals are there in the literature which try to reduce the static power consumption either by modulating the laser or by allowing the on-chip stations to share the photonic channels. In this paper, we propose OpSAVE— an optical NoC that combines the above two strategies to effectively reduce static power consumption. It proposes a superior prediction mechanism based on the eviction details from the private caches. It explains how shared channels can be used to dynamically balance the load and at the same time handle mispredictions. It allows the optical stations to share both the power and the available bandwidth to increase their utilization. Moreover, OpSAVE proposes to use a double pumping strategy to improve the system performance. We compared our scheme with the state-of-the-art proposals in this domain and the results show that our scheme consumes 4.4X less optical power and at the same time improves the performance by nearly 28%. In the evaluation, we have considered the multicore benchmarks from the Splash and Parsec benchmark suites.