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Published September 15, 2016 | Version v1
Conference paper Open

Accurately Modeling a Photonic NoC in a Detailed CMP Simulation Framework

  • 1. Departamento de Ingenieria de Sistemas y Computadores, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
  • 2. Centro de Tecnologia Nanofotonica de Valencia, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
  • 3. Departamento de Ingenieria de Sistemas y Computadores ,Universidad Politecnica de Valencia

Description

Photonic interconnects are a promising solution for the so-called communication bottleneck in current Chip Multiprocessor (CMPs) architectures. This technology presents an inherent low-latency and power consumption almost independent of communication distance, which are really desirable features in future Networks on Chip for next CMPs generations. However, since nanophotonic technology is still growing and therefore in an immature state, current simulators of detailed systems may not provide accurate models of photonic components. In this context, non-representative results are obtained when unaccurate photonic models are assumed.

This paper summarizes all of the components that conform a fully operative photonic NoC and presents their current state of the art. Moreover, we evaluate a realistic photonic network that consists of two photonic rings and a token-based arbitration mechanism and compare it against a non-realistic model. In addition, both realistic and non-realistic schemes are evaluated under different  configurations varying the number of wavelengths that photonic waveguides employ. The experimental results show that the non-realistic NoC presents up to 6× network latency deviation with respect to the accurate model. This deviation is translated into a performance deviation higher than 10% in several applications studied, which demonstrates the importance of accurate models when simulating current technologies under development like nanophotonics.

Finally, a power consumption model of the realistic photonic network is presented. The results show that the overall photonic network power consumption grows with the number of wavelengths per waveguide since the number of required modulators and receivers becomes higher. In this way, the proposed realistic photonic network, which employs only two wavelengths for arbitration and destination selection tasks, increases its power consumption up to 3%, so network designs with more complex arbitration mechanisms must take into account the impact of the number of wavelengths on the power consumption.

Notes

This paper has been presented at the Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Parallel and Distributed Systems (in conjunction with the High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS) conference), 2016.

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Additional details

Related works

Is previous version of
10.1109/HPCSim.2016.7568361 (DOI)

Funding

ExaNeSt – European Exascale System Interconnect and Storage 671553
European Commission