Cooperative communication for efficient and scalable all-to-all barrier synchronization on mesh-based many-core NoCs

Abstract

On many-core Network-on-Chips (NoCs), communication is on the critical path of system performance and contended synchronization requests may cause large performance penalty. Different from conventional algorithm-based approaches, the paper addresses the barrier synchronization problem from the angle of optimizing its communication performance and proposes cooperative communication as a means to achieve efficient and scalable all-to-all barrier synchronization on mesh-based many-core NoCs. With the cooperative communication, routers collaborate with one another to accomplish a fast barrier synchronization task. The cooperative communication is implemented in our router at low cost. Through comparative experiments, our approach evidently exhibits high efficiency and good scalability.