Reliability-aware application mapping onto mesh based Network-on-Chip

In Network-on-Chip based multi-core systems, application mapping is a critical issue as it affects the overall system performance in terms of average packet delay (APD) and system reliability. As the number of Intellectual Property (IP) cores integrated into a single chip increase, heat dissipation becomes a major issue. Due to non-uniform heat spreading, thermal hotspots are formed which reduces the system reliability. In this work, we have proposed a reliability model which in turn considers thermal effect due to computation and communication entities present in the network. Based on the reliability model, we have proposed a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation of the mapping problem for improving system reliability with a constraint on the APD of the network. To address large sized applications, we have used a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based mapping method. The basic PSO has been augmented with a constructive heuristic to improve the system reliability further. Experiments have been conducted on applications belonging to SPLASH-2 and PARSEC benchmark suites, which shows significant improvement in system reliability, compared to other works mentioned in the literature.