Impact of non-uniform subnets on the performance of wireless network-on-chip architectures

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that organizing cores in a network-on-chip (NoC) into subnets and adding a wireless router per subnet help improve performance by reducing the communication latency. Uniform subnets, where each subnet has about the same number of cores, are not beneficial for general purpose applications, because different application may require different number of cores for better performance. On average, uniform/fixed subnets may involve multiple subnets, multiple hops, and thus introduces more delay and consumes more power. In this work, we study the impact of non-uniform subnets in wireless NoC (WNoC) architectures on performance and power consumption. A 64-core architecture is partitioned into distinct sized subnets to get advantage of workloads that require different number of processing cores. VisualSim simulation tool is used to design and model the proposed systems. The tool is used to generate random workloads with six jobs, which has 31 individual subtasks. The preliminary experimental results show that non-uniform partition of subnets helps in reducing the communication latency by up to 11.11%, hop count by up to 26.26%, and the total power consumption by up to 14.76% when compared with those of uniform subnets.