FPGA-Based Prototyping of a 2D MESH / TORUS On-Chip Interconnect

Donglai Dai,  Aniruddha Vaidya,  Roy Saharoy,  Seungjoon Park,  Dongkook Park,  Hariharan L Thantry,  Ralf Plate,  Elmar Maas,  Akhilesh Kumar,  Mani Azimi
Intel Corporation


Abstract

Chip multiprocessors can be expected to scale to several tens of cores and beyond and need more capable and scalable interconnects to provide performance as well as a rich feature set including support for adaptive and flexible communication and fault-tolerance. 2D mesh and torus are attractive choices but their adoption in manycore processor designs is dependent on a verifiable and robust micro-architecture and a validated set of features. FPGA based systems have recently become a cost-effective, rapid prototyping vehicle for chip multiprocessor architectures. In this paper we present, our FPGA based prototype of a 2D on-die interconnect architecture. Our prototype is a highly configurable full-scale design of the target interconnect that supports configurability of several different micro-architectural options, routing algorithms and traffic characteristics to exercise the interconnect. The prototype is supported by a rich development environment and novel software capabilities including a very detailed performance visualization infrastructure. We demonstrate several configurations on a 6x6 2D network emulator setup.