Network-on-Chip with Long-Range Wireless Links for High-Throughput Scientific Computation

Abstract

Several emerging application domains in scientific computing demand high computation throughputs to achieve terascale or higher performance. Dedicated centers hosting scientific computing tools on a few high-end servers could rely on hardware accelerator co-processors that contain multiple lightweight custom cores interconnected through an on-chip network. While network-on-chip (NoC) driven platforms have been studied in the context of accelerating individual applications, this work studies the efficacy of NoC-based platforms to enhance overall computation throughput in the presence of several concurrently executing jobs. Use of long-range links has been shown to reduce network diameter and we use this property in conjunction with different resource allocation strategies to deliver high throughput. Our experiments using a computational biology application suite as a demonstration study show that the use of long-range wireless shortcuts coupled with the appropriate resource allocation strategy delivers computation throughput over 1011 operations per second, consuming ~0.5 nJ per operation.