Large-scale distributed deep learning training has enabled developments of more complex deep neural network models to learn from larger datasets for sophisticated tasks. In particular, distributed stochastic gradient descent intensively invokes all-reduce operations for gradient update, which dominates communication time during iterative training epochs. In this work, we identify the inefficiency in widely used all-reduce algorithms, and the opportunity of algorithm-architecture co-design. We propose MultiTree all-reduce algorithm with topology and resource utilization awareness for efficient and scalable all-reduce operations, which is applicable to different interconnect topologies. Moreover, we co-design the network interface to schedule and coordinate the all-reduce messages for contention-free communications, working in synergy with the algorithm. The flow control is also simplified to exploit the bulk data transfer of big gradient exchange. We evaluate the co-design using different all-reduce data sizes for synthetic study, demonstrating its effectiveness on various interconnection network topologies, in addition to state-of-the-art deep neural networks for real workload experiments. The results show that MultiTree achieves 2.3× and 1.56× communication speedup, as well as up to 81% and 30% training time reduction compared to ring all-reduce and state-of-the-art approaches, respectively.

Scalable Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) have become the standard interconnection mechanisms in large-scale multicore architectures. These NoCs consume a large fraction of the on-chip power budget, where the static portion is becoming dominant as technology scales down to sub-10nm node. Therefore, it is essential to reduce static power so as to achieve power- and energy-efficient computing. Power-Gating as an effective static power saving technique can be used to power off inactive routers for static power saving. However, packet deliveries in irregular power-gated networks suffer from detour or waiting time overhead to either route around or wake up power-gated routers. In this article, we proposeFly-Over (Flov), a voting approach for dynamic router power-gating in a light-weight and distributed manner, which includesFlovrouter microarchitecture, adaptive power-gating policy, and low-latency dynamic routing algorithms. We evaluateFlovusing synthetic workloads as well as real workloads from PARSEC 2.1 benchmark suite. Our full-system evaluations show thatFlovreduces the power consumption of NoC by 31 and 20 percent, respectively, on average across several benchmarks, compared to the baseline and the state-of-the-art while maintaining the similar performance.

The data explosion and faster data analysis demand have spawned emerging applications that operate over myriads of data and exhibit large memory footprints with low data reuse rate. Such characteristics lead to enormous data movements across the memory hierarchy and pose significant pressure on modern communication fabrics and memory subsystems. To mitigate the worsening gap between high processor computation density and deficient memory bandwidth, memory networks, and near-data processing techniques are proposed to keep improving system performance and energy efficiency. In this article, we propose Active-Routing, an in-network near-data processing architecture for data-flow execution, which enables computation en-route by exploiting patterns of aggregation over intermediate results. The proposed architecture leverages the massive memory cube- and vault-level parallelism as well as network concurrency to optimize the aggregation operations along a dynamically built Active-Routing Tree. It also introduces page granular computation offloading to amortize the offloading overhead and improve the throughput. Compared to the state-of-the-art processing-in-memory architecture, the evaluations show that the baseline Active-Routing can achieve up to 7× speedup with an average of 60 percent performance improvement, and reduce the energy-delay product by 80 percent across various benchmarks. Further optimizations with vault-level parallelism and page granular offloading can achieve an extra order of magnitude improvement.

Ever increasing performance demand and shrinking in the transistor size together result in complex and dense packing in large chips. That motivates designers to opt for many small specialized hardware modules in a chip to extract maximum performance benefits with relatively lower complexity and cost. These altogether opens up new directions for heterogeneous modular System-on-Chip (SoC) research, where a large system is built by assembling small independently designed chiplets (small chips). We focus on the communication aspect of such SoCs, especially the newly observed deadlock among chiplets. Even though deadlock is a classic problem in networks and many solutions are available, the modular SoC design demands customized solutions that preserves the design flexibility for chiplet designers. We proposeRemote Control (RC), a simple routing oblivious deadlock avoidance scheme based on selective injection-control mechanism. Along with guarantee on deadlock freedom,RCaims to provide a methodology to make each independently designed chiplet seamlessly integrate in any modular SoCs. We achieve up to 56.34% throughput and 15.49% zero load latency improvements on synthetic traffic and up to 20% speedup on real workloads taken from vast range of benchmark suites, over the state-of-the-art turn restriction based technique applied in the modular SoC domain.

The explosion of data availability and the demand for faster data analysis have led to the emergence of applications exhibiting large memory footprint and low data reuse rate. These workloads, ranging from neural networks to graph processing, expose compute kernels that operate over myriads of data. Significant data movement requirements of these kernels impose heavy stress on modern memory subsystems and communication fabrics. To mitigate the worsening gap between high CPU computation density and deficient memory bandwidth, solutions like memory networks and near-data processing designs are being architected to improve system performance substantially. In this work, we examine the idea of mapping compute kernels to the memory network so as to leverage in-network computing in data-flow style, by means of near-data processing. We propose Active-Routing, an in-network compute architecture that enables computation on the way for near-data processing by exploiting patterns of aggregation over intermediate results of arithmetic operators. The proposed architecture leverages the massive memory-level parallelism and network concurrency to optimize the aggregation operations along a dynamically built Active-Routing Tree. Our evaluations show that Active-Routing can achieve upto 7X speedup with an average of 60% performance improvement, and reduce the energy-delay product by 80% across various benchmarks compared to the state-of-the-art processing-in-memory architecture.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been widely accepted for diverse general purpose applications due to a massive degree of parallelism. The demand for large-scale GPUs processing a large volume of data with high throughput has been rising rapidly. However, in large-scale GPUs, a bandwidth-efficient network design is challenging. Compression techniques are a practical remedy to effectively increase network bandwidth by reducing data size transferred. We propose a new simple compression mechanism, Dual Pattern Compression (DPC), that compresses only two patterns with a very low latency. The simplicity of compression/decompression is achieved through data remapping and data-type-aware data preprocessing which exploits bit-level data redundancy. The data type is detected during runtime. We demonstrate that our compression scheme effectively mitigates the network congestion in a large-scale GPU. It achieves IPC improvement by 33% on average (up to 126%) across various benchmarks with average space savings ratios of 61% in integer, 46% (up to 72%) in floating-point and 23% (up to 57%) in character type benchmarks.

General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) are becoming a cost-effective hardware approach for parallel computing. Many executions on the GPGPUs place heavy stress on the memory system, creating network bottlenecks near memory controllers. We observe that data redundancy in communication traffic is common-place across a wide range of GPGPU applications. To exploit the data redundancy, we propose a packet coalescing mechanism to alleviate the network bottlenecks by directly reducing the traffic volume. The key idea is to coalesce multiple packets into one without increasing the packet size when they carry redundant cache blocks. To ensure that the coalesced packets are delivered to their respective destinations, we adopt multicast routing for the interconnection network of GPGPUs. Our coalescing approach yields 15% IPC improvement (up to 112%) in a large-scale GPGPU with 2D mesh across various GPGPU applications, by reducing average memory access time (AMAT) by 15.5% (up to 65.2%) and obtaining network bandwidth savings by 13% (up to 37%). Also, our coalescing approach achieves 7% IPC improvement in the NVIDIA Fermi architecture with the crossbar.

Scalable Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) have become the de facto interconnection mechanism in large scale Chip Multiprocessors. Not only are NoCs devouring a large fraction of the on-chip power budget but static NoC power consumption is becoming the dominant component as technology scales down. Hence reducing static NoC power consumption is critical for energy-efficient computing. Previous research has proposed to power-gate routers attached to inactive cores so as to save static power, but requires centralized control and global network knowledge. In this paper, we propose Fly-Over (FLOV), a light-weight distributed mechanism for power-gating routers, which encompasses FLOV router architecture, handshake protocols, and a partition-based dynamic routing algorithm to maintain network functionalities. With simple modifications to the baseline router architecture, FLOV can facilitate FLOV links over power-gated routers. Then we present two handshake protocols for FLOV routers, restricted FLOV that can power-gate routers under restricted conditions and generalized FLOV with more power saving capability. The proposed routing algorithm provides best-effort minimal path routing without the necessity for global network information. We evaluate our schemes using synthetic workloads as well as real workloads from PARSEC 2.1 benchmark suite. Our full system evaluations show that FLOV reduces the total and static energy consumption by 18% and 22% respectively, on average across several benchmarks, compared to state-of-the-art NoC power-gating mechanism while keeping the performance degradation minimal.

Reducing static NoC power consumption is becoming critical for energy-efficient computing as technology scales down since NoCs are devouring a large fraction of the on-chip power budget. We propose Fly-Over (FLOV), a light-weight distributed mechanism for power-gating routers. With simple modifications to the baseline router architecture, FLOV links are facilitated over power-gated routers. A Handshake protocol that allows seamless router power-gating in addition to a dynamic routing algorithm, that provides best-effort minimal path without the necessity for global network information, maintain normal NoC functionality. We evaluate our schemes using synthetic workloads as well as real workloads from PARSEC 2.1 benchmark suite. The results show that FLOV can achieve on average 19.2% latency reduction and 15.9% total energy savings.

Modern computational workloads require abundant thread level parallelism (TLP), necessitating highly-parallel, many-core accelerators such as General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). GPGPUs place a heavy demand on the on-chip interconnect between the many cores and a few memory controllers (MCs). Thus, traffic is highly asymmetric, impacting on-chip resource utilization and system performance. Here, we analyze the communication demands of typical GPGPU applications, and propose efficient Network-on-Chip (NoC) designs to meet those demands. We show that the proposed schemes improve performance by up to 64.7%. Compared to the best of class prior work, our VC monopolizing and partitioning schemes improve performance by 25%.

Nanophotonics has been proposed to design low latency and high bandwidth NOC for future Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). Recent nanophotonic NOC designs adopt the token-based arbitration coupled with credit-based flow control, which leads to low bandwidth utilization. In this work, we propose two handshake schemes for nanophotonic interconnects in CMPs, Global Handshake (GHS) and Distributed Handshake (DHS), which get rid of the traditional credit-based flow control, reduce the average token waiting time, and finally improve the network throughput. Furthermore, we enhance the basic handshake schemes with setaside buffer and circulation techniques to overcome the Head-Of-Line (HOL) blocking. Our evaluation shows that the proposed handshake schemes improve network throughput by up to 62% under synthetic workloads. With the extracted trace traffic from real applications, the handshake schemes can reduce the communication delay by up to 59%. The basic handshake schemes add only 0.4% hardware overhead for optical components and negligible power consumption. In addition, the performance of the handshake schemes is independent of on-chip buffer space, which makes them feasible in a large scale nanophotonic interconnect design.

Chip Multi-Processor (CMP) architectures have become mainstream for designing processors. With a large number of cores, Network-On-Chip (NOC) provides a scalable communication method for CMP architectures, where wires become abundant resources available inside the chip. NOC must be carefully designed to meet constraints of power and area, and provide ultra low latencies. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Physical Channel Regulator (APCR) for NOC routers to exploit huge wiring resources. The flit size in an APCR router is less than the physical channel width (phit size) to provide finer granularity flow control. An APCR router allows flits from different packets or flows to share the same physical channel in a single cycle. The three regulation schemes (Monopolizing, Fair-sharing and Channel-stealing) intelligently allocate the output channel resources considering not only the availability of physical channels but the occupancy of input buffers. In an APCR router, each Virtual Channel can forward a dynamic number of flits every cycle depending on the run-time network status. Our simulation results using a detailed cycle-accurate simulator show that an APCR router improves the network throughput by over 100% in synthetic workloads, compared with a traditional design with the same buffer size. An APCR router can outperform a traditional router even if the buffer size is halved.

Multiprocessor systems have been popular for their high performance not only for server markets but also for computing environments for general users. With the increased software complexity, networking overheads in multiprocessor systems are becoming one of the most influential factors in overall system performance. In this paper, we attempt to reduce communication overheads through a data packet compression technique integrating a cache coherence protocol. Here we propose Variable Size Compression (VSC) scheme that compresses or completely eliminates data packets while harmonizing with existing cache coherence protocols. Simulation results show approximately 23% of improvement on average in terms of overall system performance when compared with the most recent compression scheme. VSC also improves performance by 20% on average in terms of cache miss latency.

As the chip multiprocessor (CMP) design moves toward many-core architectures, communication delay in Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been a major bottleneck in CMP systems. Using high-density memories in input buffers helps to reduce the bottleneck through increasing throughput. Spin-Torque Transfer Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) can be a suitable solution due to its nature of high density and near-zero leakage power. But its long latency and high power consumption in write operations still need to be addressed. We explore the design issues in using STT-MRAM for NoC input buffers. Motivated by short intra-router latency, we use the previously proposed write latency reduction technique sacrificing retention time. Then we propose a hybrid design of input buffers using both SRAM and STT-MRAM to hide the long write latency efficiently. Considering that simple data migration in the hybrid buffer consumes more dynamic power compared to SRAM, we provide a lazy migration scheme that reduces the dynamic power consumption of the hybrid buffer. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme enhances the throughput by 21% on average.

We attempt to provide an architectural support for fast and efficient bounds checking for multithread work-loads in chip-multiprocessor (CMP) environments. Bounds information sharing and smart tagging help to perform bounds checking more effectively utilizing the characteristics of a pointer. Also, the BCache architecture allows fast access to the bounds information. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme increasesμPC of memory operations by 29% on average compared to the previous hardware scheme.

As technology advanced, Chip Multi-processor (CMP) architectures have emerged as a viable solution for designing processors. Networks-on-Chip (NOCs) provide a scalable communication method for CMP architectures as the number of cores is increasing. Although there has been significant research on NOC designs for unicast traffic, the research on the multicast router design is still in infancy stage. Considering that one-to-many (multicast) and one-to-all (broadcast) traffic are more common in CMP applications, it is important to design a router providing efficient multicasting. In this paper, we propose an efficient lookahead routing with limited area overhead for a recently proposed multicast routing algorithm, Recursive Partitioning Multicast (RPM) [17]. Also, we present a novel compression scheme for a multicast packet header that becomes a big overhead in large networks. Comprehensive simulation results show that with our route computation logic design, providing lookahead routing in the multicast router only costs less than 20% area overhead and this percentage keeps decreasing with larger network sizes. Compared with the basic lookahead routing design, our design can save area by over 50%. With header compression and lookahead multicast routing, the network performance is improved by 22% in a (16 x 16) network on average.

Switched networks have been adopted in on-chip communication for their scalability and efficient resource sharing. However, using a general network for a specific domain may result in unnecessary high cost and low performance when the interconnects are not optimized for the domain. Designing an optimal network for the specific domain is challenging because in-depth knowledge of interconnects and the application domain is required. Recently proposed Nonuniform Cache Architectures (NUCAs) use wormhole-routed 2D mesh networks in L2 caches. We observe that in NUCAs, network resources are underutilized with the considerable area cost (41 percent of cache) and the network delay is significantly large (63 percent of cache access time). Motivated by our observations, we investigate both router architecture and network topology for communication behaviors in large-scale cache systems. We present Fast-LRU replacement, where cache replacement overlaps with data request delivery. Next, we propose a deadlock-free XYX routing algorithm in a mesh network and present a new halo network topology to reduce the required links. Finally, we introduce a single-cycle multicast router that needs small modification of the unicast router design. Simulation results show that our design improves the average IPC by 38 percent over the mesh design with Multicast Promotion replacement and uses 12 percent of the interconnection area of the mesh network.

Interconnection networks have been widely adopted in multicomputer systems, clusters, or chip multiprocessors (CMPs) for high performance and low latency. Among various routing algorithms in interconnection networks, adaptive routing shows the best performance with most traffic types. In this paper, we propose two practical adaptive routing algorithms, called adaptive injection (AI) and adaptive layer selection (AL), which utilize the pipelined architecture and multi-layer networks. In AI, a node adaptively selects a layer to which it injects a packet according to the current network status. After injection, the packet uses deterministic routing. In AL, a packet can change the layers during its delivery. AI is especially good when the network size is small, while AL shows better performance in general. In addition, these adaptive decisions are made only when the remaining hops are less than some threshold value, or oblivious routing is selected in other cases. The simulation results show that considering the remaining hops successfully decreases the number of adaptive decisions and two proposed routing schemes show better performance than previous adaptive algorithms. On the average, AI outperforms existing routing algorithms in terms of throughput by 7.1% ~ 65.2%. AL with AI shows better performance especially when the network size is large. Its throughput is improved by 12.5% ~73.8% in an (8 times 8) mesh network.

With the recent design shift towards increasing the number of processing elements in a chip, high-bandwidth support in on-chip interconnect is essential for low-latency communication. Much of the previous work has focused on router architectures and network topologies using wide/long channels. However, such solutions may result in a complicated router design and a high interconnect cost. In this paper, we exploit a table-based data compression technique, relying on value patterns in cache traffic. Compressing a large packet into a small one can increase the effective bandwidth of routers and links, while saving power due to reduced operations. The main challenges are providing a scalable implementation of tables and minimizing overhead of the compression latency. First, we propose a shared table scheme that needs one encoding and one decoding tables for each processing element, and a management protocol that does not require in-order delivery. Next, we present streamlined encoding that combines flit injection and encoding in a pipeline. Furthermore, data compression can be selectively applied to communication on congested paths only if compression improves performance. Simulation results in a 16-core CMP show that our compression method improves the packet latency by up to 44% with an average of 36% and reduces the network power consumption by 36% on average.

As circuit integration technology advances, the design of efficient interconnects has become critical. On-chip networks have been adopted to overcome scalability and the poor resource sharing problems of shared buses or dedicated wires. However, using a general on-chip network for a specific domain may cause underutilization of the network resources and huge network delays because the interconnects are not optimized for the domain. Addressing these two issues is challenging because in-depth knowledges of interconnects and the specific domain are required. Non-uniform cache architectures (NUCAs) use wormhole-routed 2D mesh networks to improve the performance of on-chip L2 caches. We observe that network resources in NUCAs are underutilized and occupy considerable chip area (52% of cache area). Also the network delay is significantly large (63% of cache access time). Motivated by our observations, we investigate how to optimize cache operations and and design the network in large scale cache systems. We propose a single-cycle router architecture that can efficiently support multicasting in on-chip caches. Next, we present fast-LRU replacement, where cache replacement overlaps with data request delivery. Finally we propose a deadlock-free XYX routing algorithm and a new halo network topology to minimize the number of links in the network. Simulation results show that our networked cache system improves the average IPC by 38% over the mesh network design with multicast promotion replacement while using only 23% of the interconnection area. Specifically, multicast fast-LRU replacement improves the average IPC by 20% compared with multicast promotion replacement. A halo topology design additionally improves the average IPC by 18% over a mesh topology

This paper proposes dynamic thermal management (DTM) based on a dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique for MPEG-4 decoding to guarantee thermal safety while maintaining a quality of service (QoS) constraint. Although many low-power and low-temperature multimedia playback techniques have been proposed, most of them are impractical in real-time and have several restricting assumptions. Multimedia data consists of several frames requiring different decoding efforts. Since both temperature and performance of a multimedia system are affected by the complexity of scenes, our main idea is to use the information on scene complexity to find an appropriate frequency. In order to predict the complexity of the current scene, we extract information from the previous group of pictures (GOP) using feedback control with a display buffer. Experimental results with twelve movies show that our DTM scheme guarantees the threshold of temperature (70degC) while maintaining 0% frame miss ratio. Also, our DTM scheme decreases the average temperature by up to 13% without any additional hardware and playback latency.

The popularity of multimedia streaming services via wireless home networks has confronted major challenges in quality improvement for services through a set top box (STB). Even though scalable methods have been suggested to enhance the quality of multimedia streaming services, it is still challenging how to provide scalable streaming services in wireless home networks. Previous studies on scalable streaming services eliminate the corrupted stream at the multimedia client. In this paper, we propose a new method, ActiveSTB, which removes the distorted or unsuitable multimedia data early to save frugal resources. We use a network simulation tool, NS-2, to evaluate our method with various range of cross traffic and error rates. The simulation results show that ActiveSTB support 12.5% to 40% more packets than the original STB for all ranges of cross traffic and error rates.

InfiniBand architecture (IBA) is envisioned to be the default communication fabric for future system area networks (SANs) or clusters. However, IBA design is currently in its infancy since the released specification outlines only higher level functionalities, leaving it open for exploring various design alternatives. In this paper, we investigate four corelated techniques for providing high and predictable performance in IBA. These are: 1) using the shortest path first (SPF) algorithm for deterministic packet routing, 2) developing a multipath routing mechanism for minimizing congestion, 3) developing a selective packet dropping scheme to handle deadlock and congestion, and 4) providing multicasting support for customized applications. These designs are implemented in a pipelined, IBA-style switch architecture, and are evaluated using an integrated workload consisting of MPEG-2 video streams, best- effort traffic, and control traffic on a versatile IBA simulation testbed. Simulation results with 15-node and 30-node irregular networks indicate that the SPF routing, multipath routing, packet dropping, and multicasting schemes are quite effective in delivering high and assured performance in clusters

Along with energy conservation, it has been a critical issue to maintain a desired degree of coverage in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in a mobile environment. By enhancing a variant of random waypoint (RWP) model, we propose mobility resilient coverage control (MRCC) to assure if-coverage in the presence of mobility. Our basic goals are (1) to elaborate the probability of breaking if-coverage with moving-in and moving-out probabilities, and (2) to issue wake-up calls to sleeping sensors to meet user requirement of if-coverage even in the presence of mobility. Furthermore, by separating the mobility behavior into average and individual, the probability of breaking if-coverage can be precisely calculated, hence reducing the number of sensors to be awakened. Our experiments with NS2 show that MRCC with the individual probability achieves better coverage by 1.4% with 22% fewer numbers of active sensors than that of existing coverage configuration protocol (CCP).

The popularity of multimedia streaming services via wireless networks presents major challenges in the management of network bandwidth. One challenge is to quickly and precisely estimate the available bandwidth for the decision of streaming rates of layered and scalable multimedia services. Previous works based on wired networks are too burdensome to be applied to multimedia applications in wireless networks. In this paper, a new method, IdleGap, is suggested to estimate the available bandwidth of a wireless LAN based on the information from a low layer in the protocol stack. We use a network simulation tool, NS-2, to evaluate our new method with various range of cross traffic and observation times. Our simulation results show that IdleGap accurately estimates the available bandwidth for all ranges of cross traffic (100 Kbps~1 Mbps) with a very short observation time of 10 seconds

Widely adopted distributor-based systems forward user requests to a balanced set of waiting servers in complete transparency to the users. The policy employed in forwarding requests from the front-end distributor to the backend servers dominates the overall system performance. The locality-aware request distribution (LARD) scheme improves the system response time by having the requests serviced by the Web servers that contain the data in their caches. In this paper, we propose a proactive request distribution (PRORD) that applies an intelligent proactive-distribution at the front-end and complementary pre-fetching at the back-end server nodes to obtain the data of high relation to the previous requests in their caches. The prefetching scheme fetches the Web pages in advance into the memory based on a confidence value of the Web page, which is predicted by the proactive distribution scheme. Designed to work with the prevailing Web technologies, such as HTTP 1.1, our scheme aims to provide reduced response time to the users. Simulations carried out with traces derived from the log files of real Web servers witness performance boost of 15-45 % compared to the existing distribution policies

In recent years integrating multiprocessors in a single chip is emerging for supporting various scientific and commercial applications, with diverse demands to the underlying on-chip networks. Communication traffic of these applications makes routers greedy to acquire more power such that the total consumed power of the network may exceed the supplied power and cause reliability problems. To ensure high performance and power constraint satisfaction, the on-chip network must have a peak power control mechanism. In this paper, we propose a credit-based peak power control scheme to assure power consumption to be under the given peak power constraint, without performance degradation. The peak power control scheme efficiently regulates each flow's injection rate at the sender to minimize performance penalty. We have two different throttling schemes for real-time traffic and best-effort traffic; a rate-based throttling and an energy-budget based throttling, respectively. The simulation results on mesh networks show that the credit-based peak power control effectively prevents performance degradation and meets the peak power constraint.

Designing energy-efficient clusters has recently become an important concern to make these systems economically attractive for many applications. Since the cluster interconnect is a major part of the system, the focus of this paper is to characterize and optimize the energy consumption in the entire interconnect. Using a cycle-accurate simulator of an InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) compliant interconnect fabric and actual designs of its components, we investigate the energy behavior on regular and irregular interconnects. The energy profile of the three major components (switches, network interface cards (NICs), and links) reveals that the links and switch buffers consume the major portion of the power budget. Hence, we focus on energy optimization of these two components. To minimize power in the links, first we investigate the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) algorithm and then propose a novel dynamic link shutdown (DLS) technique. The DLS technique makes use of an appropriate adaptive routing algorithm to shut down the links intelligently. We also present an optimized buffer design for reducing leakage energy in 70nm technology. Our analysis on different networks reveals that, while DVS is an effective energy conservation technique, it incurs significant performance penalty at low to medium workload. Moreover, energy saving with DVS reduces as the buffer leakage current becomes significant with 70nm design. On the other hand, the proposed DLS technique can provide optimized performance-energy behavior (up to 40 percent energy savings with less than 5 percent performance degradation in the best case) for the cluster interconnects.

The InfiniBand/sup TM/ Architecture (IBA) is envisioned to be the default communication fabric for future system area networks (SAN). However, the released IBA specification outlines only higher level functionalities, leaving it open for exploring various design alternatives. In this paper we investigate four co-related techniques to provide high and predictable performance in IBA. These are: (i) using the shortest path first (SPF) algorithm for deterministic packet routing; (ii) developing a multipath routing mechanism for minimizing congestion; (iii) developing a selective packet dropping scheme to handle deadlock and congestion; and (iv) providing multicasting support for customized applications. These designs are evaluated using an integrated workload on a versatile IBA simulation testbed. Simulation results indicate that the SPF routing, multipath routing, packet dropping, and multicasting schemes are quite effective in delivering high and assured performance in clusters. One of the major contributions of this research is the IBA simulation testbed, which is an essential tool to evaluate various design tradeoffs.

Designing energy-efficient clusters has recently become an important concern to make these systems economically attractive for many applications. Since the links and switch buffers consume the major portion of the power budget of the cluster, the focus of this paper is to optimize the energy consumption in these two components. To minimize power in the links, we propose a novel dynamic link shutdown (DLS) technique. The DLS technique makes use of an appropriate adaptive routing algorithm to shutdown the links intelligently. We also present an optimized buffer design for reducing leakage energy. Our analysis on different networks using a complete system simulator reveals that the proposed DLS technique can provide optimized performance-energy behavior (up to 40% energy savings with less than 5% performance degradation in the best case) for the cluster interconnects.

Admission and congestion control mechanisms are integral parts of any Quality of Service (QoS) design for networks that support integrated traffic. In this paper we propose an-admission control algorithm and a congestion control algorithm for clusters, which are increasingly being used in a diverse set of applications that require QoS guarantees. The uniqueness of our approach is that we develop these algorithms for wormhole-switched networks. We use QoS-capable wormhole routers and QoS-capable network interface cards (NICs), referred to as Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) in InfiniBand/spl trade/ Architecture (IBA), to evaluate the effectiveness of these algorithms. The admission control is applied at the HCAs and the routers, while the congestion control is deployed only at the HCAs. Simulation results indicate that the admission and congestion control algorithms are quite effective in delivering the assured performance. The proposed credit-based congestion control algorithm is simple and practical in that it relies on hardware already available in the HCA to regulate traffic injection.

With the increasing use of clusters in real-time applications, it has become essential to design high-performance networks with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. We explore the feasibility of providing QoS in wormhole switched routers, which are widely used in designing scalable, high-performance cluster interconnects. In particular, we are interested in supporting multimedia video streams with CBR and VBR traffic, in addition to the conventional best-effort traffic. The proposed MediaWorm router uses a rate-based bandwidth allocation mechanism, called Fine-Grained VirtualClock (FGVC), to schedule network resources for different traffic classes. Our simulation results on an 8-port router indicate that it is possible to provide jitter-free delivery to VBR/CBR traffic up to an input load of 70-80 percent of link bandwidth and the presence of best-effort traffic has no adverse effect on real-time traffic. Although the MediaWorm router shows a slightly lower performance than a pipelined circuit switched (PCS) router, commercial success of wormhole switching, coupled with simpler and cheaper design, makes it an attractive alternative. Simulation of a (2/spl times/2) fat-mesh using this router shows performance comparable to that of a single switch and suggests that clusters designed with appropriate bandwidth balance between links can provide required performance for different types of traffic.

Design of high performance cluster networks (routers) with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees is becoming increasingly important to support a variety of multimedia applications, many of which have real-time constraints. Most commercial routers, which are based on the wormhole-switching paradigm, can deliver high performance, but lack QoS provisioning. In this paper, we present a pipelined wormhole router architecture that can provide high and predictable performance for integrated traffic in clusters. We consider two different implementations—a non-preemptive model and a more aggressive preemptive model. We also present the design of a network interface card (NIC) based on the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) design paradigm to support QoS in the NIC. The QoS capable router and NIC designs are evaluated with a mixed workload consisting of best-effort traffic, multimedia streams, and control traffic.

The growing use of clusters in diverse applications, many of which have real-time constraints, requires Quality-of-Service (QoS) support from the underlying cluster interconnect. In this paper we propose an analytical model that captures the characteristics of a QoS capable wormhole router which is the basic building block of cluster networks. The model captures the behavior of integrated traffic in a cluster and computes the average deadline missing probability for real-time traffic. The cluster interconnect, considered here, is a hypercube network. Comparison of Deadline Missing Probability (DMP) using the proposed model with that of the simulation shows that our analytical model is accurate and useful.

With the increasing use of clusters in real-time applications, it has become essential to design high performance networks with quality of service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of providing QoS in worm-hole switched routers, which are otherwise well known for designing high performance interconnects. In particular, we are interested in supporting multimedia video streams, in addition to the conventional best-effort traffic. The proposed MediaWorm router uses a rate-based bandwidth allocation mechanism, called Virtual Clock, to schedule network resources for different traffic classes. Our simulation results on an 8-port router indicate that it is possible to provide jitter-free delivery to VBR/CBR traffic up to an input load of 70-80% of link bandwidth, and the presence of best effort traffic has no adverse effect on the real-time traffic. Although the MediaWorm router shows a slightly lower performance than a pipelined circuit switched (PCS) router, commercial success of worm-hole switching coupled with the simpler and cheaper design makes it an attractive alternative. Simulation of a (2/spl times/2) fat-mesh using this router suggests that clusters designed with appropriate bandwidth balance between links can provide good performance for different types of traffic.