Crispín Gómez

Deterministic versus Adaptive Routing in Fat-Trees

Clusters of PCs have become very popular to build high performance computers. These machines use commodity PCs linked by a high speed interconnect. Routing is one of the most important design issues of interconnection networks. Adaptive routing usually better balances network traffic, thus allowing the network to obtain a higher throughput. However, adaptive routing introduces out-of-order packet delivery, which is unacceptable for some applications. Concerning topology, most of the commercially available interconnects are based on fat-tree. Fat-trees offer a rich connectivity among nodes, making possible to obtain paths between all source-destination pairs that do not share any link. We exploit this idea to propose a deterministic routing algorithm for fat-trees, comparing it with adaptive routing in several workloads. The results show that deterministic routing can achieve a similar, and in some scenarios higher, level of performance than adaptive routing, while providing in-order packet delivery.

Reducing Packet Dropping in a Bufferless NoC

Networks on chip (NoCs) has a strong impact on overall chip performance. Interconnection bandwidth is limited by the critical path delay. Recent works show that the critical path includes the switch input buffer control logic. As a consequence, by removing buffers, switch clock frequency can be doubled. Recently, a new switching technique for NoCs called Blind Packet Switching (BPS) has been proposed. It is based on replacing the buffers of the switch ports by simple latches. Since buffers consume a high percentage of switch power and area, BPS not only improves performance but also helps in reducing power and area. In BPS there are no buffers at the switch ports, so packets can not be stopped. If the required output port is busy, the packet will be dropped. In order to prevent packet dropping, some techniques based on resource replication has been proposed. In this paper, we propose some alternative and complementary techniques that does not rely on resource replication. By using these techniques, packet dropping and its negative effects are highly reduced. In particular, packet dropping is completely removed for a very wide network traffic range. The first dropped packet appears at a 11.6 higher traffic load. As a consequence, network throughput is increased and the packet latency is kept almost constant.

Exploiting Network-on-Chip structural redundancy for a cooperative and scalable built-in self-test architecture

This paper proposes a built-in self-test/self-diagnosis procedure at start-up of an on-chip network (NoC). Concurrent BIST operations are carried out after reset at each switch, thus resulting in scalable test application time with network size. The key principle consists of exploiting the inherent structural redundancy of the NoC architecture in a cooperative way, thus detecting faults in test pattern generators too. At-speed testing of stuck-at faults can be performed in less than 1200 cycles regardless of their size, with an hardware overhead of less than 11%.

Assessing fat-tree topologies for regular network-on-chip design under nanoscale technology constraints

Most of past evaluations of fat-trees for on-chip interconnection networks rely on oversimplifying or even irrealistic architecture and traffic pattern assumptions, and very few layout analyses are available to relieve practical feasibility concerns in nanoscale technologies. This work aims at providing an in-depth assessment of physical synthesis efficiency of fat-trees and at extrapolating silicon-aware performance figures to back-annotate in the system-level performance analysis. A 2D mesh is used as a reference architecture for comparison, and a 65 nm technology is targeted by our study. Finally, in an attempt to mitigate the implementation cost of k-ary n-tree topologies, we also review an alternative unidirectional multi-stage interconnection network which is able to simplify the fat-tree architecture and to minimally impact performance.

RUFT: Simplifying the Fat-Tree Topology

The fat-tree is one of the most widely-used topologies by interconnection network manufacturers. Recently, a deterministic routing algorithm that optimally balances the network traffic in fat--trees was proposed. It can not only achieve almost the same performance than adaptive routing, but also outperforms it for some traffic patterns. Nevertheless, fat-trees require a high number of switches with a non-negligible wiring complexity. In this paper, we propose replacing the fat-tree by an unidirectional multistage interconnection network referred to as reduced unidirectional fat-tree (RUFT) that uses a a simplified version of the aforementioned deterministic routing algorithm. As a consequence, switch hardware is almost reduced to the half, decreasing, in this way, power consumption, arbitration complexity, switch size, and network cost. Evaluation results show that RUFT obtains lower latency than fat-tree for low and medium traffic loads. Furthermore, in large networks, it obtains almost the same throughput than the classical fat-tree.

Exploiting Wiring Resources on Interconnection Network: Increasing Path Diversity

On-chip networks are the answer to the growing demands for high communication performance of chip multiprocessors. These networks have a number of characteristics that make their design quite different to off-chip networks. In particular, wires are an abundant available resource inside the chip. In this paper, we explore how to organize the huge wiring capabilities available in on-chip networks. In particular, we analyze the option of distributing the wires among several parallel links connecting the same two switches. This technique is known as Space Division Multiplexing (SDM). The number of parallel sub-links and their width are two key parameters that are studied together with the relationship with the mean packet size. The paper shows that SDM is a technique to take into account in on-chip networks since it allows to highly increase the network accepted traffic at the expense of a small latency increase or even no increase. Moreover, in some networks, it allows to reduce the network hardware, providing simiar performance results, which results in a reduction in the consumption of area and power.

Beyond Fat--tree: Unidirectional Load--Balanced Multistage Interconnection Network

The fat-tree is one of the most widely-used topologies by interconnection network manufacturers. Recently, it has been demonstrated that a deterministic routing algorithm that optimally balances the network traffic can not only achieve almost the same performance than an adaptive routing algorithm but also outperforms it. On the other hand, fat-trees require a high number of switches with a non-negligible wiring complexity. In this paper, we propose replacing the fat-tree by a unidirectional multistage interconnection network (UMIN) that uses a traffic balancing deterministic routing algorithm. As a consequence, switch hardware is almost reduced to the half, decreasing, in this way, the power consumption, the arbitration complexity, the switch size itself, and the network cost. Preliminary evaluation results show that the UMIN with the load balancing scheme obtains lower latency than fat-tree for low and medium traffic loads. Furthermore, in networks with a high number of stages or with high radix switches, it obtains the same, or even higher, throughput than fat-tree.

An Efficient Switching Technique for NoCs with Reduced Buffer Requirements

Networks on chip (NoCs) communicate the components located inside a chip. Overall system performance depends on NoC performance, that is affected by several factors. One of them is the network clock frequency, imposed by the critical path delay. Recent works show that switch critical path includes buffer control logic. Consequently, by removing switch buffers, switch frequency can be doubled. In this paper, we exploit this idea, proposing a new switching technique for NoCs which requires a reduced amount of storage at the switches. It is based on replacing switch port buffers by single latches. By doing so, network cycle can be reduced, which reduces packet latency. On the other hand, power and area consumption requirements can be reduced. However, since there are no buffers at the switch ports, packets can not be stopped. Stopped packets due to contention are dropped and reinjected from their senders via negative acknowledgments. Packet dropping is strongly reduced by exploiting NoCs wiring capability.

An efficient fault-tolerant routing methodology for fat-tree interconnection networks

In large cluster-based machines, fault-tolerance in the interconnection network is an issue of growing importance, since their increasing size rises the probability of failure. The topology used in these machines is usually a fat-tree. This paper proposes a new distributed fault-tolerant routing methodology for fattrees. It does not require additional network hardware. It is scalable, since the required memory, switch hardware and routing delay do not depend on the network size. The methodology is based on enhancing the Interval Routing scheme with exclusion intervals. Exclusion intervals are associated to each switch output port, and represent the set of nodes that are unreachable from this port after a failure appears. We propose a mechanism to identify the exclusion intervals that must be updated after detecting a failure, and the values to write on them. Our methodology is able to support a relatively high number of network failures with a low degradation in network performance.

A New Family of Hybrid Topologies for Large-Scale Interconnection Networks

In large supercomputers the topology of the interconnection network is a key design issue that impacts the performance and cost of the whole system. Direct topologies provide a reduced hardware cost, but as the number of dimensions is conditioned by 3D wiring restrictions, a high number of nodes per dimension is used, which increases communication latency and reduces network throughput. On the other hand, indirect topologies can provide better performance for large network sizes, but at the cost of a high amount of switches and links. In this paper we propose a new family of topologies that combines the best features of both direct and indirect topologies to efficiently connect an extremely high number of nodes. In particular, we propose an n-dimensional topology where the nodes of each dimension are connected through a small indirect topology. This combination results in a family of topologies that provides high performance, with latency and throughput figures of merit close to indirect topologies, but with a lower hardware cost. In particular, it is able to double the throughput obtained per switching element of indirect topologies. Moreover, the layout of the topology is much simpler than in indirect topologies. Indeed, its fault-tolerance degree is equal or higher than the one for direct and indirect topologies.