Part V: A NOC Design Methodology

1. 1 Part V:A NOC Design Methodology Juha-Pekka Soininen VTT Electronics Oulu, Finland

2. 2 Background of the presentation Mission: How to develop a system that uses 1 billion transistor capacity effectively in 2007-2010 Maturity of design methodology: 2nd guess on how NOC based systems should be developed Related methodologies: distributed systems parallel processing systems systems on chip and ASIC design

3. 3 Outline Existing design flows NOC concept Capacity considerations Application characteristics NOC design challenges NOC design methodology NOC layers Development flow System services Architecture design problems Application development problems Conclusions

4. 4 Design Flow Space

5. 5 Extremely short introduction to existing design flows Algorithm on Chip (AoC) ASIC design flow FPGA design flow System on Chip (SoC) Codesign flow IP based design flow Platform based design flow (Resources on Chip, RoC) Configuration design flow Software design flow

6. 6 AoC Design Flow

7. 7 CoDesign Flow

8. 8 IP Based Design

9. 9 Software Design

10. 10 Capacity of Network on Chip

11. 11 �Applications� for NOC Multistandard terminal Next generation base station Simulation of human brain Virtual reality creation Telepresence Holodeck (Star Trek) Purpose of Life (Hitch Hikers Guide to Galaxy) Simulation of universe Commercial operating system :-)

12. 12 Application characteristics

13. 13 Network on Chip alternatives

14. 14 Network on Chip alternatives

15. 15 Network on Chip alternatives

16. 16 Network on Chip alternatives

17. 17 NOC design challenges

18. 18 Figure of Merit for NOC based systems

19. 19 Basic requirements for NOC design methodology Reuse of intellectual property blocks best performance/energy ratio best mapping to application characteristics Reuse of hardware (and architecture) best complexity/cost and performance/cost ratio only way to even dream of achieving time-to-profit requirements Reuse of design methods and tools only way to deal with heterogenuous application set

20. 20 NOC Design Methodology

21. 21 Structural layers of NOC

22. 22 Logical layers of NOC Backbone Communication resources Basic set of system services Architecture design methods and tools Platform Computation and storage resources System services Application design methods and tools System Functionality of computation(code, configuration) Control (OS, NetOS) Validation and verification support

23. 23 Development of NOC based systems

24. 24 Using Design Space for NOC

25. 25 System Services Purpose to hide implementation details from application developer Execution services Communication, resource allocation and conversion services Control services Power management, reconfiguration, load migration, fault detection and recovery, data collection and analysis Development support services Language interfacing, compilers, libraries, optimisations, debugging, testing, validation, etc. System services are part of backbone and platform

26. 26 NOC Platform development Scaling problem How big NOC is needed? What are the application area requirements? Region definition problem What kind of regions are needed? What kind of interfaces between regions? What are the capacity requirements for the regions? Resource design problem What is needed inside resources? Internal computation type and internal communication? Application mapping flow problem What kind of languages, models and tools must be supported? How to validate and test the final products?

27. 27 NOC Application Development Mapping problem How to partition applications for NOC resources? How to allocate functionality effectively? Is the performance adequate? Is the resource usage in balance? Optimisation problem How to perform global optimisation of heterogenuous applications? How to define right optimisation targets? How to utilise application/resource type specific tools? Validation problem Are the contraints met? Are the communication bottlenecks or power consumption hot spots? How to simulate 10000 GIPS system? How to test all applications?

28. 28 Methods & Tools Analysis of applications (characterisation) analysis of complexity, computation type, communication requirement, storage, etc. for scaling, region and resource type selection, and application mapping Different abstraction levels: workload model, application model, execution model Validation of decisions network simulations at various abstraction levels (effects of mapping) Estimation of quality characteristics global vs. local optimisation of the system SW architecture vs. HW architecture computation vs. engine Development support virtual execution platforms for application developers integration of existing design tools for resource level design

29. 29 Conclusions Development of NOC systems will be a huge effort reuse in all levels is a must reuse of architecture, hardware and software in product reuse of different languages, methods, tools and practices during development Backbone, platform, system based design methodology apporach provides variability and performance Analysis, decision, estimation and validation methods are the cornerstones of NOC development complexity, functionality, workload vs. capacity, performance, efficiency