Multiple-combinational-channel: A network architecture for workload balance and deadlock free

• We combine low usage channels and keep high usage channels wide enough.
• Our method balances the workload of traffic in NoC.
• Our method can avoid protocol-level deadlocks.
• Our method achieves high throughput in practice.
• Our method reduces area and power without the loss of performance.

As the number of cores in chip multiprocessors (CMPs) increases rapidly, network-on-chips (NoCs) have become the major role in ensuring performance and power scalability. In this paper, we propose multiple-combinational-channel (MCC), a load balancing and deadlock free interconnect network, for cache-coherent non-uniform memory accessing (CC-NUMA). In order to make load more balancing and reduce power dissipation, we combine low usage channels and make high usage channels independent and wide enough, since messages transmitted over NoC have different widths and injection rates. Furthermore, based on the in-depth analysis of network traffic, we summarize four traffic patterns and establish several rules to avoid protocol-level deadlocks. We implement MCC on a 16-core CMPs, and evaluate the workload balance, area, power and performance using universal workloads. The experimental results show that MCC reduces nearly 21% power than multiple-physical-channel with similar throughput. Moreover, MCC improves 10% performance with similar area and power, compared to packet-switching architecture with virtual channels.