High-Performance On-Chip Interconnects for Emerging SoCs
ACACES 2017
Course Information
| Instructor | Professor Tushar Krishna |
| tushar@ece.gatech.edu | |
| Website | https://tusharkrishna.ece.gatech.edu |
Prerequisite(s): Advanced Computer Architecture or Equivalent
Course Description
Interconnection Networks refer to the communication fabric interconnecting various components of a computer system. They occur at various scales from on-chip networks (OCN)/Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) in billion-transistor many-core chips, to custom high-speed wired networks in HPC supercomputers, to optical fiber networks within datacenters. The growing emphasis on parallelism, distributed computing, heterogeneity, and energy-efficiency across all these systems makes the design of the communication fabric critical to both high-performance and low power consumption.
This course examines the architecture, design methodology, and trade-offs of interconnection networks. The material covered in this course bridges the gap between disciplines/courses such as VLSI interconnects, digital communication, computer architecture, distributed systems, and computer networks. The focus of the course will be on on-chip interconnection networks for emerging SoCs that comprise heterogeneous cores and accelerators. The insights and learning will span chip-scale, rack-scale, and datacenter-scale networks as well.
Lectures will cover the fundamental building blocks of interconnection networks, getting to the research frontier at each level topology, routing, flow-control, microarchitecture, network interfaces, and system interactions. By the end of the course, students will acquire the intuition and skill-set required to build and evaluate a state-of-the-art network-on-chip that meets desired performance, area, and energy specs for the target system (homogeneous many-core, heterogeneous SoC, or a spatial accelerator).
Textbook(s) [optional]
N. E. Jerger, T. Krishna and L.-S Peh, “On-Chip Networks, Second Edition” Morgan Claypool Publishers, 2017.
W. J. Dally and B. Towles, “Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks,” Morgan Kauffman Publishers, 2004.
J. Duato, S. Yalamanchili, L. Ni, “Interconnection Networks: An Engineering Approach,” Morgan Kauffman Publishers, 2002.
Schedule
| Date | Topic | Slides | Additional Readings |
| Jul 10 | Intro+Topology | L01-Intro+Topology | [MICRO2007] FBFLY |
| Jul 11 | Routing | L02-Routing | [PACT2011] ARIADNE |
| Jul 13 | Flow Control | L03-FlowControl | [HPCA2013] SMART |
| Jul 14 | Microarch + Case Studies | Intel Skylake Mesh |