Task model for on-chip communication infrastructure design for multicore systems

With technology scaling, Multiprocessor System on Chip (MPSoC) which consist of multiple processors connected via a Network on Chip (NoC) have become prevalent. Applications are mapped to MPSoC's by representing it in the form of a task graph. Task scheduling involves mapping task to processor cores so as to meet the deadline. For a given deadline, slack at each node is defined by the amount of time by which a task execution can be delayed without missing the deadline. With increase in the number of cores and high application parallelism, NoC is becoming a bottleneck due to the presence of large number of concurrent communications. Increasing network resources (links and routers) reduces the communication time but the area and power goes up. In this paper we present an application aware heuristic to synthesize a minimal network connecting a set of cores in an MPSoC in the presence of hard deadlines. Our approach is based on modeling communication between a pair of processors as tasks known as “Comtasks”. The network is generated by “scheduling” these comtasks onto a set of routers so as to obtain a network with minimum area which fills up the available slack. Moreover, we also identify the set of overlapping comtasks and generate a minimal network to allow the maximum set of overlapping comtasks to execute concurrently. We compared our approach with a greedy network generation heuristic and the results show 80% benefit in the router area.