Position Paper: Towards Redundant Communication through Hybrid Application Mapping

Network-on-chips (NoCs) have emerged as scalable communication infrastructure for modern and future many-core architectures. The inherent redundant and parallel structures of NoCs can be exploited to increase the reliability of the communication. The idea here is to send messages over disjoint paths to increase the chances of the arrival of data even in the presence of hardware faults. As this communication strategy depends on the actual mapping of the application onto the NoC architecture, we outline in this paper how to incorporate disjoint path routing into application mapping. In particular, we investigate an emerging hybrid application mapping methodology which combines the strength of design-time and run-time approaches. We show how to detect infeasible mappings at design time and how to describe constraints to enable the run-time mapping of redundant routing paths based on the design-time analysis.