Understanding and Modeling of the Real Application Traffic Characteristics for Fast On-chip Network Evaluation

Abstract

The on-chip interconnection network is an emerging and a promising candidate for multi-core computing system's packets transmission. Fast evaluation of an on-chip optical network design is critically important at the very beginning of building an on-chip network-based computing system. Network bandwidth, average latency, and power consumption because of network devices can be obtained from an evaluation. Therefore, the accuracy of an evaluation is critical. In this paper, we reveal that traditional traffic models cannot reflect the main characteristic of emerging application workloads. By investigating the traffic characteristics from a multi-dimension, we show the gap between the traditional traffic model and the real application traffic patterns. The investigation of the application provides key elements of describing an emerging workload. These elements can be used to build more suitable traffic models for on-chip network fast evaluation stage.