Critical-Path Driven Routers for on-Chip Networks

Abstract

Multithreaded programming has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors. The performance bottleneck of a multithreaded program is its critical path, whose length is its total execution time. As the number of cores within a processor increases, Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed as a promising approach for inter-core communication. In order to optimize the performance of a multithreaded program running on an NoC based multi-core platform, we design and implement the critical-path driven router, which prioritizes inter-thread communication on the critical path when routing packets. The experimental results show that the critical-path driven router improves the execution time of the test case by 14.8% compared to the ordinary router.