Lightweight Hardware Synchronization For Avoiding Buffer Overflows In Network-On-Chips

Buffer overflows are a serious problem when running message-passing programs on network-on-chip based many-core processors. A simple synchronization mechanism ensures that data is transferred when nodes need it. Thereby, it avoids full buffers and interruption at any other time. However, software synchronization is not able to completely achieve these objectives, because its flits may still interrupt nodes or fill buffers. Therefore, we propose a lightweight hardware synchronization. It requires only small architectural changes as it comprises only very small components and it scales well. For controlling our hardware supported synchronization, we add two new assembler instructions. Furthermore, we show the difference in the software development process and evaluate the impact on the execution time of global communication operations and required receive buffer slots.