SpecMap: An efficient spectral partitioning based static application mapping algorithm for 2D mesh NoCs

Abstract

SummaryNetwork‐on‐chip (NoC) is adopted as a flexible and effective communication backbone by multiprocessor systems with core counts ranging from a few to hundreds. The performance of NoC based systems greatly rely on the communication between cores when two dependent tasks of an application are mapped to these cores. Hence, application mapping becomes a critical issue in NoC‐based systems as it affects the overall performance of the system. Application mapping aims to reduce the communication among the cores by carefully mapping the highly communicating tasks. Most of the existing static mapping approaches consider only single‐task platforms. In this article, we propose an efficient multi‐task static mapping algorithm called , for regular 2D NoC systems. consists of three stages namely, (i) graph partitioning, (ii) topology clustering, and (iii) mapping. In the graph partitioning stage, accurately identifies and groups the highly communicating tasks based on spectral graph partitioning. Then, the clustering and mapping stages allocate the most communicating tasks in the same or adjacent multi‐tasking cores. It also eliminates the interference between multiple applications by mapping them into different clusters of the NoC network. Simulations of have been conducted on different synthetic and real‐life applications using Gem5 simulator. The simulation results show considerable improvements for SpecMap in terms of communication cost, average network latency, energy consumption, throughput, and execution time as compared to the state‐of‐the‐art algorithms.