Efficient and deadlock-free routing is critical to the performance of networks-on-chip. The effectiveness of any adaptive routing algorithm strongly depends on the underlying selection strategy. A selection function is used to select the output channel where the packet will be forwarded on. In this paper we present a novel selection strategy that can be coupled with any adaptive routing algorithm. The proposed selection strategy is based on the concept of Neighbors-on-Path the aims of which is to exploit the situations of indecision occurring when the routing function returns several admissible output channels. The overall objective is to choose the channel that will allow the packet to be routed to its destination along a path that is as free as possible of congested nodes. Performance evaluation is carried out by using a flit-accurate simulator under traffic scenarios generated by both synthetic and real applications. Results obtained show how the proposed selection strategy applied to the Odd-Even routing algorithm yields an improvement in both average delay and saturation point up to 20% and 30% on average respectively, with a minimal overhead in terms of area occupation. In addition, a positive effect on total energy consumption is also observed under near-congestion packet injection rates.

Implementation and Analysis of a New Selection Strategy for Adaptive Routing in Networks-on-Chip

In this paper we present a methodology to develop efficient and deadlock free routing algorithms for Network-on-Chip (NoC) platforms which are specialized for an application or a set of concurrent applications. The proposed methodology, called application specific routing algorithm (APSRA), exploits the application specific information regarding pairs of cores which communicate and other pairs which never communicate in the NoC platform to maximize communication adaptivity and performance. The methodology also exploits the known information regarding concurrency/non-concurrency of communication transactions among cores for the same purpose. We demonstrate, through analysis of adaptivity as well as simulation based evaluation of latency and throughput, that algorithms produced by the proposed methodology give significantly higher performance as compared to other deadlock free algorithms for both homogeneous as well as heterogeneous 2D mesh topology NoC systems. For example, for homogeneous mesh NoC, APSRA results in approximately 30% less average delay as compared to odd-even algorithm just below saturation load. Similarly the saturation load point for APSRA is significantly higher as compared to other adaptive routing algorithms for both homogeneous and non-homogeneous mesh networks.

Application Specific Routing Algorithms for Networks on Chip

Computers get faster every year, but the demand for computing resources seems to grow at an even faster rate. Depending on the problem domain, this demand for more power can be satisfied by either, massively parallel computers, or clusters of computers. Common for both approaches is the dependence on high performance interconnect networks such as Myrinet, Infiniband, or 10 Gigabit Ethernet. While high throughput and low latency are key features of interconnection networks, the issue of fault-tolerance is now becoming increasingly important. As the number of network components grows so does the probability for failure, thus it becomes important to also consider the fault-tolerance mechanism of interconnection networks. The main challenge then lies in combining performance and fault-tolerance, while still keeping cost and complexity low. This paper proposes a new deterministic routing methodology for tori and meshes, which achieves high performance without the use of virtual channels. Furthermore, it is topology agnostic in nature, meaning it can handle any topology derived from any combination of faults when combined with static reconfiguration. The algorithm, referred to as segment-based routing (SR), works by partitioning a topology into subnets, and subnets into segments. This allows us to place bidirectional turn restrictions locally within a segment. As segments are independent, we gain the freedom to place turn restrictions within a segment independently from other segments. This results in a larger degree of freedom when placing turn restrictions compared to other routing strategies. In this paper a way to compute segment-based routing tables is presented and applied to meshes and tori. Evaluation results show that SR increases performance by a factor of 1.8 over FX and up*/down* routing.

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Segment-based routing: an efficient fault-tolerant routing algorithm for meshes and tori

Most standard cluster interconnect technologies are flexible with respect to network topology. This has spawned a substantial amount of research on topology-agnostic routing algorithms, which make no assumption about the network structure, thus providing the flexibility needed to route on irregular networks. Actually, such an irregularity should be often interpreted as minor modifications of some regular interconnection pattern, such as those induced by faults. In fact, topology-agnostic routing algorithms are also becoming increasingly useful for networks on chip (NoCs), where faults may make the preferred 2D mesh topology irregular. Existing topology-agnostic routing algorithms were developed for varying purposes, giving them different and not always comparable properties. Details are scattered among many papers, each with distinct conditions, making comparison difficult. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the known topology-agnostic routing algorithms. We classify these algorithms by their most important properties, and evaluate them consistently. This provides significant insight into the algorithms and their appropriateness for different on- and off-chip environments.

A Survey and Evaluation of Topology-Agnostic Deterministic Routing Algorithms

Extreme transistor technology scaling is causing increasing concerns in device reliability: the expected lifetime of individual transistors in complex chips is quickly decreasing, and the problem is expected to worsen at future technology nodes. With complex designs increasingly relying on Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) for on-chip data transfers, a NoC must continue to operate even in the face of many transistor failures. Specifically, it must be able to reconfigure and reroute packets around faults to enable continued operation, i.e., generate new routing paths to replace the old ones upon a failure. In addition to these reliability requirements, NoCs must maintain low latency and high throughput at very low area budget. In this work, we propose a distributed reconfiguration solution named Ariadne, targeting large, aggressively scaled, unreliable NoCs. Ariadne utilizes up*/down* for fast routing at high bandwidth, and upon any number of concurrent network failures in any location, it reconfigures to discover new resilient paths to connect the surviving nodes. Experimental results show that Ariadne provides a 40%-140% latency improvement (when subject to 50 faults in a 64-node NoC) over other on-chip state-of-the-art fault tolerant solutions, while meeting the low area budget of on-chip routers with an overhead of just 1.97%.

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ARIADNE: Agnostic Reconfiguration in a Disconnected Network Environment

Networks of workstations (NOWs) are being considered as a cost-effective alternative to parallel computers Many NOWs are arranged as a switch-based network with irregular topology, which makes routing and deadlock avoidance quite complicated Current proposals use the up*/down* routing algorithm to remove cyclic dependencies between channels and avoid deadlock However, routing is considerably restricted and most messages must follow non-minimal paths, increasing latency and wasting resources In this paper, we propose a new methodology to compute deadlock-free routing tables for NOWs The methodology tries to minimize the limitations of the current proposals in order to improve network performance It is based on generating an underlying acyclic connected graph from the network graph and assigning a sequence number to each switch, which is used to remove cyclic dependencies Evaluation results show that the routing algorithm based on the new methodology increases throughput by a factor of up to 2 in large networks, also reducing latency significantly

A New Methodology to Computer Deadlock-Free Routing Tables for Irregular Networks

Networks of workstations (NOWs) are being considered as a cost-effective alternative to parallel computers. Many NOWs are arranged as a switch-based network with irregular topology, which makes routing and deadlock avoidance quite complicated. Current proposals use the up*/down* routing algorithm to remove cyclic dependencies between channels and avoid deadlock. Recently, a simple and effective methodology to compute up*/down* routing tables has been proposed by us. The resulting up*/down* routing scheme makes use of a different link direction assignment to compute routing tables. Assignment of link direction is based on generating an underlying acyclic connected graph from the network graph. In this paper, we propose and evaluate new heuristic rules to compute the underlying graph. Moreover, we propose a traffic balancing algorithm to obtain more efficient up*/down* routing tables when source routing is used. Evaluation results show that the routing algorithm based on the new methodology increases throughput by a factor of up to 2.8 in large networks, also reducing latency significantly.

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Improving the Up*/Down* Routing Scheme for Networks of Workstations

NOWs are arranged as a switch-based network which allows the layout of both regular and irregular topologies. However, the irregular pattern interconnect makes routing and deadlock avoidance quite complicated. Current proposals use the up*/down* routing algorithm to remove cyclic dependencies between channels and avoid deadlock. Recently, a simple and effective methodology to compute up*/down* routing tables has been proposed by us. The resulting routing algorithm is very effective in irregular topologies. However, its behavior is very poor in regular networks with orthogonal dimensions. Therefore, we propose a more flexible routing scheme that is effective in both regular and irregular topologies. Unlike up*/down* routing algorithms, the proposed routing algorithm breaks cycles at different nodes for each direction in the cycle, thus providing better traffic balancing than that provided by up*/down* routing algorithms. Evaluation results modeling a Myrinet network show that the new routing algorithm increases throughput with respect to the original up*/down* routing algorithm by a factor of up to 3:5 for regular networks, also maintaining the performance of the improved up*/down* routing scheme proposed in [7] when applied to irregular networks.

A Flexible Routing Scheme for Networks of Workstations

InfiniBand is very likely to become the de facto standard for communication between nodes and I/O devices (SANs) as well as for interprocessor communication (NOWs). The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) defines a switch-based network with point-to-point links whose topology is arbitrarily established by the customer. Often, the interconnection pattern is irregular. Up*/down* is the most popular routing scheme currently used in NOWs with irregular topologies. However, the main drawbacks of up*/down* routing are the unbalanced channel utilization and the difficulties to route most packets through minimal paths, which negatively affects network performance. Using additional virtual lanes can improve up*/down* routing performance by reducing the head-of-line blocking effect, but its use is not aimed to remove its main drawbacks. In this paper, we propose a new methodology that uses a reduced number of virtual lanes in an efficient way to achieve a better traffic balance and a higher number of minimal paths. This methodology is based on routing packets simultaneously through several properly selected up*/down* trees. To guarantee deadlock freedom, each up*/down* tree is built over a different virtual network. Simulation results, show that the proposed methodology increases throughput up to an average factor ranging from 1.18 to 2.18 for 8, 16, and 32-switch networks by using only two virtual lanes. For larger networks with an additional virtual lane, network throughput is tripled, on average.

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Improving InfiniBand Routing through Multiple Virtual Networks

Networks of workstations (NOWs) are arranged as a switch-based network with irregular topology, which makes routing and deadlock avoidance quite complicated. Current proposals use the up*/down* routing algorithm to remove cyclic dependencies between channels and avoid deadlock. Recently, a simple and effective methodology to compute up*/down* routing tables has been proposed by us. The resulting up*/down* routing scheme increases the number of alternative paths between every pair of switches and allows most messages to follow minimal paths. Also, up*/down* routing is suitable to be implemented using source or distributed routing. Source routing provides a safer and lower cost implementation of up*/down* routing than that provided by distributed routing. However distributed routing may benefit from routing messages through alternative paths to reach their destination. In this paper we evaluate the performance of up*/down* routing when using two methodologies to compute routing tables, and when both source and distributed routing are used. Evaluation results show that it is not worth to implement up*/down* routing in a distributed way in a NOW environment, since its performance is very close to that achieved by implementing it with source routing when a traffic-balancing algorithm is used. Moreover it is shown that a greater improvement in performance can be achieved by modifying the method to compute up*/down* routing tables when source routing is used.

José Carlos Sancho

Papers

A New Methodology to Computer Deadlock-Free Routing Tables for Irregular Networks

Improving the Up/Down Routing Scheme for Networks of Workstations

A Flexible Routing Scheme for Networks of Workstations

Improving InfiniBand Routing through Multiple Virtual Networks

On the relative behavior of source and distributed routing in NOWs using Up/Down routing schemes

José Carlos Sancho

Papers

A New Methodology to Computer Deadlock-Free Routing Tables for Irregular Networks

Improving the Up*/Down* Routing Scheme for Networks of Workstations

A Flexible Routing Scheme for Networks of Workstations

Improving InfiniBand Routing through Multiple Virtual Networks

On the relative behavior of source and distributed routing in NOWs using Up*/Down* routing schemes

Improving the Up/Down Routing Scheme for Networks of Workstations

On the relative behavior of source and distributed routing in NOWs using Up/Down routing schemes