SoftRM

Abstract

Many-core systems are envisioned to leverage the ever-increasing demand for more powerful computing systems. To provide the necessary computing power, the number of Processing Elements integrated onchip increases and NoC based infrastructures are adopted to address the interconnection scalability. The advent of these new architectures surfaces the need for more sophisticated, distributed resource management paradigms, which in addition to the extreme integration scaling, make the new systems more prone to errors manifested both at hardware and software. In this work, we highlight the need for Run-Time Resource management to be enhanced with fault tolerance features and propose SoftRM, a resource management framework which can dynamically adapt to permanent failures in a self-organized, workload-aware manner. Self-organization allows the resource management agents to recover from a failure in a coordinated way by electing a new agent to replace the failed one, while workload awareness optimizes this choice according to the status of each core. We evaluate the proposed framework on Intel Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC), a NoC based many-core system and customize it to achieve minimum interference on the resource allocation process. We showcase that its workload-aware features manage to utilize free resources in more that 90% of the conducted experiments. Comparison with relevant state-of-the-art fault tolerant frameworks shows decrease of up to 67% in the imposed overhead on application execution. CCS Concepts: • General and reference → Cross-computing tools and techniques; • Computer systems organization → Multicore architectures; • Networks → Network on chip; • Computing methodologies → Self-organization;

A Survey of Software-Defined Networks-on-Chip: Motivations, Challenges and Opportunities

“…The increasing number of processing cores in the current NoC-based system imposes new management and supervision requirements [ 18 ]. Some processing elements in the network serve as controller cores, which keep track of the status of the system and provide this information to the rest of the processing elements [ 18 ].…”

“…The SDNoC approach bears a simpler and configurable router architecture with an external software controller that changes the routing paths according to real-time constraints, which differs from other software-based control proposed in the literature [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. In 2015, we introduced a layered SDN architecture in the NoCs, employing the SDNoC concept [ 20 ].…”

“…Chip faults exhibit different syndromes and have various causes that affect NoC reliability[18,[25][26][27].…”