Congestion in on-chip networks may cause many drawbacks in multiprocessor systems including throughput reduction, increase in latency, and additional power consumption. Furthermore, conventional congestion control methods, employed for on-chip networks, cannot efficiently collect congestion information and distribute them over the on-chip network. In this paper, we present a novel structure for on-chip networks, named Agent-based Network-on-Chip (ANoC), to diagnose the congested areas. In addition to the presented structure, an efficient Congestion-Aware Selection (CAS) method is proposed to reduce overall network latency. CAS is capable of selecting an appropriate output channel to route packets along a less congested path. 29% average and 35% maximum latency reduction are achieved on SPLASH-2 and PARSEC benchmarks running on a 36-core Chip Multi-Processor.
Published in:
VLSI and System-on-Chip (VLSI-SoC), 2011 IEEE/IFIP 19th International Conference on
Date of Conference: 3-5 Oct. 2011