Machine Learning Enabled Solutions for Design and Optimization Challenges in Networks-on-Chip based Multi/Many-Core Architectures

Due to the advancement of transistor technology, a single chip processor can now have hundreds of cores. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been the superior interconnect fabric for multi/many-core on-chip systems because of its scalability and parallelism. Due to the rise of dark silicon with the end of Dennard Scaling, it becomes essential to design energy efficient and high performance heterogeneous NoC-based multi/many-core architectures. Because of the large and complex design space, the solution space becomes difficult to explore within a reasonable time for optimal trade-offs of energy-performance-reliability. Furthermore, reactive resource management is not effective in preventing problems from happening in adaptive systems. Therefore, in this work, we explore machine learning techniques to design and configure the NoC resources based on the learning of the system and applications workloads. Machine learning can automatically learn from past experiences and guide the NoC intelligently to achieve its objective on performance, power, and reliability. We present the challenges of NoC design and resource management and propose a generalized machine learning framework to uncover near-optimal solutions quickly. We propose and implement a NoC design and optimization solution enabled by neural networks, using the generalized machine learning framework. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed neural networks-based design and optimization solution improves performance by 15% and reduces energy consumption by 6% compared to an existing non-machine learning-based solution while the proposed solution improves NoC latency and throughput compared to two existing machine learning-based NoC optimization solutions. The challenges of machine learning technique adaptation in multi/many-core NoC have been presented to guide future research.