Fly-Over: A Light-Weight Distributed Router Power-Gating Mechanism for Energy-Efficient Interconnects

Abstract

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 they either required centralized decision making and global network knowledge or a non-scalable escape ring network. In this paper, we propose Fly-Over (FLOV), a light-weight distributed mechanism for power gating routers, which encompasses FLOV router microarchitecture and a partition-based dynamic routing algorithm to maintain network functionality. With simple modifications to the baseline router microarchitecture, FLOV can facilitate fly-over links over power-gated routers. The proposed routing algorithm provides best-effort minimal path routing without the necessity for global network information. We evaluate our scheme using both unicast and multicast synthetic workloads as well as real workloads from PARSEC 2.1 benchmark suite. The results show that FLOV can achieve 19.2% latency reduction and 16.9% total power savings.