FPGA-based prototyping of a 2D MESH / TORUS on-chip interconnect (abstract only)

Many-core chip multiprocessors can be expected to scale to tens of cores and beyond in the near future. Existing and emerging workloads on general-purpose many-core processors typically exhibit fast-changing, unpredictable on-chip communication traffic full of burstiness and jitters between different functional blocks. To provide high sustainable performance, scalable interconnects with a rich feature set including support for adaptive and flexible communication, performance isolation, and fault-tolerance are needed. 2D mesh and torus are attractive choices because they are physical layout friendly and scale more gracefully in network latency and bisection bandwidth than other simple interconnects such as buses or rings. However, the adoption of 2D mesh/torus in many-core processor designs is dependent on a verifiable and robust micro-architecture and a validated set of features. FPGA based systems have recently become a cost-effective, rapid prototyping vehicle for chip multiprocessor architectures. In this paper we present an FPGA based prototype of 2D on-die interconnect architecture. Our prototype is a highly configurable full-scale design that supports options selecting many different micro-architectural features and routing algorithms. The prototype incorporates a synthetic traffic generator to exercise and evaluate our design. To facilitate evaluation and characterization, a rich development environment and novel software capabilities including a very detailed performance visualization infrastructure has been developed. We demonstrate the experiment results of several configurations on a 6x6 2D network emulator setup in this paper.