A Scalable Interconnection Scheme in Many-Core Systems

Abstract

Recent architectures of multi-core systems may have a relatively large number of cores that typically ranges from tens to hundreds; therefore called many-core systems. Such systems require an efficient interconnection network that tries to address two major problems. First, the overhead of power and area cost and its effect on scalability. Second, high access latency is caused by multiple cores' simultaneous accesses of the same shared module. This paper presents an interconnection scheme called N-conjugate Shuffle Clusters (NCSC) based on multi-core multicluster architecture to reduce the overhead of the just mentioned problems. NCSC eliminated the need for router devices and their complexity and hence reduced the power and area costs. It also resigned and distributed the shared caches across the interconnection network to increase the ability for simultaneous access and hence reduce the access latency. For intra-cluster communication, Multi-port Content Addressable Memory (MPCAM) is used. The experimental results using four clusters and four cores each indicated that the average access latency for a write process is 1.14785 ± 0.04532 ns which is nearly equal to the latency of a write operation in MPCAM. Moreover, it was demonstrated that the average read latency within a cluster is 1.26226 ± 0.090591 ns and around 1.92738 ± 0.139588 ns for read access between cores from different clusters.