IsoNet: Hardware-Based Job Queue Management for Many-Core Architectures

Junghee Lee, Chrysostomos Nicopoulos, Hyung Gyu Lee, Shreepad Panth, Sung Kyu Lim, Jongman Kim
2013 IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (vlsi) Systems  
Imbalanced distribution of workloads across a chip multiprocessor (CMP) constitutes wasteful use of resources. Most existing load distribution and balancing techniques employ very limited hardware support and rely predominantly on software for their operation. This paper introduces IsoNet, a hardwarebased conflict-free dynamic load distribution and balancing engine. IsoNet is a lightweight job queue manager responsible for administering the list of jobs to be executed, and maintaining load
more » ... ce among all CMP cores. By exploiting a micro-network of load-balancing modules, the proposed mechanism is shown to effectively reinforce concurrent computation in many-core environments. Detailed evaluation using a full-system simulation framework indicates that IsoNet significantly outperforms existing techniques and scales efficiently to as many as 1024 cores. Furthermore, to assess its feasibility, the IsoNet design is synthesized, placed, and routed in 45-nm VLSI technology. Analysis of the resulting low-level implementation shows that IsoNet's area and power overhead are almost negligible. Index Terms-Job queue, load balancing, many-core, multicore. 1 The first stem of the compound word IsoNet is derived from the Greek word "isos," which means "equal." Thus, IsoNet is a network tasked with maintaining equal load between the processing cores of the CMP.
doi:10.1109/tvlsi.2012.2202699 fatcat:kcd2je7dave6dmyx6rjmze3g6q