Using packet information for efficient communication in NoCs

Multithreaded workloads like SPLASH2 and PARSEC generate heavy network traffic. This traffic consists of different packets injected by various nodes at various points of time. A packet consists of three essential components viz., source, destination and data. In this work, we study the opportunity to increase the efficiency of the underlying network. We come up with novel methods to share various components of the packets present in a router at any time. We provide an analysis of the performance gains over contemporary optimization techniques. We conduct experiments on a 64 node setup as well as a 512 node setup and record the energy consumption, IPC gains, network latency and throughputs. We show that our technique outperforms the contemporary Hamiltonian routing by 8.43% and VCTM routing by 7.7% on an average, in terms of IPC speedup.