A Hierarchical Distributed Runtime Resource Management Scheme for NoC-Based Many-Cores

Abstract

As technology constantly strengthens its presence in all aspects of human life, computing systems integrate a high number of processing cores, whereas applications become more complex and greedy for computational resources. Inevitably, this high increase in processing elements combined with the unpredictable resource requirements of executed applications at design time impose new design constraints to resource management of many-core systems, turning the distributed functionality into a necessity. In this work, we present a distributed runtime resource management framework for many-core systems utilizing a network-on-chip (NoC) infrastructure. Specifically, we couple the concept of distributed management with parallel applications by assigning different roles to the available computing resources. The presented design is based on the idea of local controllers and managers, whereas an on-chip intercommunication scheme ensures decision distribution. The evaluation of the proposed framework was performed on an Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer, an actual NoC-based, many-core system. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme manages to allocate resources efficiently at runtime, leading to gains of up to 30% in application execution latency compared to relevant state-of-the-art distributed resource management frameworks.