Efficient trace-driven metaheuristics for optimization of networks-on-chip configurations

As industry moves towards many-core chips, networks-on-chip (NoCs) are emerging as a scalable communication fabric for interconnecting the cores. With increasing core counts, there is a corresponding increase in communication demands in multi-core designs to facilitate high core utilization, and a consequent critical need for high-performance NoCs. Another megatrend in advanced technologies is that power has become the most critical design constraint. In this paper, we focus on trace-driven virtual channel (VC) allocation in application-specific NoCs. We propose a new significant VC failure metric to capture the impact of VCs on network performance and efficiently drive NoC optimization. Our proposed metaheuristics achieve up to 38% reduction in the number of VCs under a given average packet latency constraint. In addition, compared to a recently proposed trace-driven VC allocation approach, we obtain up to an O(|L|) speedup, where |L| is total number of links in the network, with no degradation in the quality of results.