Citation
Rebecca Collins, Luca Carloni. "Topology-Based Performance Analysis and Optimization of Latency-Insensitive Systems". Technical report, Columbia University, CUCS-003-08, January, 2008.

Abstract
Latency-insensitive protocols allow system-on-chip engineers to decouple the design of the computing cores from the design of the inter-core communication channels while following the synchronous design paradigm. In a latency-insensitive system (LIS) each core is encapsulated within a shell, a synthesized interface module that dynamically controls its operation. At each clock period, if new data has not arrived on an input channel or a stalling request has arrived on an output channel, the shell stalls the core and buffers other incoming valid data for future processing. The combination of finite buffers and backpressure from stalling can cause throughput degradation. Previous works addressed this problem by increasing buffer space to reduce the backpressure requests or inserting extra buffering to balance the channel latency around a LIS. We explore the theoretical complexity of these approaches and propose a heuristic algorithm for efficient queue sizing. We also practically characterize several LIS topologies and how the topology of a LIS can impact not only how much throughput degradation will occur, but also the difficulty of finding optimal queue sizing solutions.

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Citation formats

• HTML

  Rebecca Collins, Luca Carloni. <a
  href="http://www.gigascale.org/pubs/1287.html"><i>Topology-Based
  Performance Analysis and Optimization of Latency-Insensitive
  Systems</i></a>, Technical report,  Columbia
  University, CUCS-003-08, January, 2008.

• Plain text

  Rebecca Collins, Luca Carloni. "Topology-Based Performance
  Analysis and Optimization of Latency-Insensitive Systems".
  Technical report,  Columbia University, CUCS-003-08,
  January, 2008.

• BibTeX

  @techreport{CollinsCarloni08_TopologyBasedPerformanceAnalysisOptimizationOfLatencyInsensitive,
      author = {Rebecca Collins and Luca Carloni},
      title = {Topology-Based Performance Analysis and
                Optimization of Latency-Insensitive Systems},
      institution = {Columbia University},
      number = {CUCS-003-08},
      month = {January},
      year = {2008},
      abstract = {Latency-insensitive protocols allow system-on-chip
                engineers to decouple the design of the computing
                cores from the design of the inter-core
                communication channels while following the
                synchronous design paradigm. In a
                latency-insensitive system (LIS) each core is
                encapsulated within a shell, a synthesized
                interface module that dynamically controls its
                operation. At each clock period, if new data has
                not arrived on an input channel or a stalling
                request has arrived on an output channel, the
                shell stalls the core and buffers other incoming
                valid data for future processing. The combination
                of finite buffers and backpressure from stalling
                can cause throughput degradation. Previous works
                addressed this problem by increasing buffer space
                to reduce the backpressure requests or inserting
                extra buffering to balance the channel latency
                around a LIS. We explore the theoretical
                complexity of these approaches and propose a
                heuristic algorithm for efficient queue sizing. We
                also practically characterize several LIS
                topologies and how the topology of a LIS can
                impact not only how much throughput degradation
                will occur, but also the difficulty of finding
                optimal queue sizing solutions.},
      URL = {http://www.gigascale.org/pubs/1287.html}
  }
  

Posted by Rebecca Collins on 22 Apr 2008..

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