Multi-application multi-step mapping method for many-core Network-on-Chips

Massive parallel computing performed on many-core Network-on-Chips (NoCs) is the future of the computing. One feasible approach to implement parallel computing is to deploy multiple applications on the NoC simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a multi-application mapping method starting with the application mapping which finds a region on the NoC for each application and then task mapping which maps all tasks of the application into each region. In the application mapping step, several strategies based on the maximal empty rectangle (MER) technique are introduced for finding an optimal region for each application. In the task mapping step, a tree-model based algorithm is used with the purpose of reducing the communication latency and energy consumption. The experiment results show that the proposed method can achieve considerable reduction of network latency and energy consumption (up to 18%) for a given set of applications.