A mesh-of-trees interconnection network for single-chip parallel processing

There is a recent surge of interest in single-chip parallel processors. In such machines, it is crucial to implement a high-throughput low-latency interconnection network to connect the on-chip components, especially the processing units and the memory units. In this paper, we propose a new mesh of trees (MoT) implementation of the interconnection network and evaluate it relative to metrics such as wire area, total switch delay and maximum throughput taking into account latency-throughput trade-offs. We show that on-chip interconnection networks can provide higher bandwidth between processors and shared first-level cache than previously considered possible, facilitating greater scalability of memory architectures that require that. MoT is also compared, both analytically and experimentally, to some other traditional network topologies, such as hypercube, butterfly.. fat trees and butterfly fat trees. When we evaluate a 64-terminal MoT network at 65nm technology, concrete results show that MoT provides higher throughput and lower latency especially when the input traffic (or the on-chip parallelism) is high, at the cost of larger area. A recurring problem in networking and communication is that of achieving good sustained throughput in contrast to just high theoretical peak performance that does not materialize for typical work loads. Our quantitative results demonstrate a clear advantage of the proposed MoT network in the context of single-chip parallel processing.