RAIR: Interference Reduction in Regionalized Networks-on-Chip

Abstract

With the advent of many-core systems capable of hosting multiple concurrently running applications, the traffic characteristics of networks-on-chip (NoCs) may exhibit new regional behaviors. By recognizing and exploiting these traffic behaviors, the effectiveness of NoC interference reduction techniques can be greatly improved. However, few works have investigated these regional behaviors and their potential impact on interference, leaving the opportunity largely unexplored. In this paper, we identify and characterize regional behavior in NoC and propose RAIR, a region-aware interference reduction technique that not only removes any restrictions on the inter-region traffic patterns, but also captures and exploits regional behavior throughout the design, thus improving the effectiveness of interference reduction. Evaluation using a cycle-accurate simulator shows that RAIR can improve the average packet latency by up to 17% on synthetic traffic patterns and up to 26% on PARSEC benchmarks compared to state-of-the-art interference reduction techniques.