SCALPsim. a tool for modeling asynchronous Self-Organizing 3-D NoC architectures

Manycore architectures are mainly composed of a very large amount of computing nodes interconnected with a multiplicity of links usually forming a NoC-like mesh architecture. High-speed links permit to obtain a higher throughput but are much more expensive than normal links, making the interconnection of the system a cost/performance trade-off. Simulating such architectures is very important in order to characterise the optimal network topology for a given problem. In this work we introduce SCALPsim: a simulation framework permitting to evaluate routing algorithms and network properties in 1-D, 2-D and 3-D regular mesh topologies simultaneously using links of different characteristics in terms of latency and throughput. These features are particularly interesting in large scale systems with processing elements grouped into clusters, where communication properties differ largely inside and between clusters. This paper presents the framework and an application based on Cellular Self-Organizing Maps - CSOM.