CLBM: Controlled load-balancing mechanism for congestion management in silicon interposer NoC architecture.

Multiple memory stacks can be integrated with a processor chip in the silicon interposer technology ("2.5D" stacking). In 2.5D architecture, there are two different network layers for both coherence and memory traffic. The CPU layer is used for coherence Core-to-Core traffic, while the interposer layer is associated with Core-to-Memory blocks traffic regularly. A load balancing strategy balances the traffics on the two network layers and optimizes the resources utilization. In the aforementioned strategy, after detecting congestion in the CPU layer, packets can be moved to the interposer one. It can be concluded that this transferring encounters the bottleneck of the edge portion that is connected to memory blocks. In this paper, we propose a Controlled Load Balancing Mechanism (CLBM) which efficiently controls bottleneck in load balancing methods. As a result, the CLBM selects an appropriate network based on the destination address without comparing latencies of two networks. Moreover, a multicast fault-tolerant ring is introduced to propagate network congestion information. The experimental results showed that, as compared with the absence of load balancing method and traditional load balancing strategy, our CLBM strategy achieves 37.82% and 17.22% average latency improvements and 22.19% and 8.55% average total power with minor overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]