On the Potential of NoC Virtualization for Multicore Chips

As the end of Moores-law is on the horizon, power becomes a limiting factor to continuous increases in performance gains for single-core processors. Processor engineers have shifted to the multicore paradigm and many-core processors are a reality. Within the context of these multi-core chips, three key metrics point themselves out as being of major importance, performance, fault-tolerance (including yield), and power consumption. A solution that optimizes all three of these metrics is challenging. As the number of cores increases the importance of the interconnection network-on-chip (NoC) grows as well, and chip designers should aim to optimize these three key metrics in the NoC context as well. In this paper we identify and discuss the main properties that a NoC must exhibit in order to enable such optimizations. In particular, we propose the use of virtualization techniques at the NoC level. AS a major finding, we identify the implementation of routing algorithms to become a key design parameter in order to achieve an effective virtualization of the chip should also supporting broadcast within the virtualized context. The intention behind this paper is for it to serve as a position paper on the topic of virtualization for NoC and the challenges that should be met at the routing layer in order to maximize performance, fault-tolerance and power consumption in multicore chips.