Impact of Message Based Fault Detectors on Applications Messages in a Network on Chip

Abstract

Future many-cores will accommodate a high number of cores, but the tera-scale transistors increases the failure rates in cores and interconnection networks of such chips. Message-based fault detection techniques have been developed to mitigate the influence of faults to the system. In this paper, we investigate the message overhead for fault detection monitoring with decentralized Fault Detection Units in a unified 2D-mesh and assess the resulting delays of application messages. We investigate routing algorithms for different message types and demonstrate 19% reduction of the impact of fault detection messages on application messages. We also show the limitations of prioritized fault detection messages for different application message packet injection rates.