Scalable communication architectures for massively parallel hardware multi-processors

Modern complex embedded applications inmultiple application fields impose stringent and continuously increasing functional and parametric demands. To adequately serve these applications, massively parallel multi-processor systems on a single chip (MPSoCs) are required. This paper is devoted to the design of scalable communication architectures of massively parallel hardware multi-processors for highlydemanding applications. We demonstrated that in the massively parallel hardware multi-processors the communication network influence on both the throughput and circuit area dominates the processors influence, while the traditionally used flat communication architectures do not scale well with the increase of parallelism. Therefore, we propose to design highly optimized application-specific partitioned hierarchical organizations of the communication architectures through exploiting the regularity and hierarchy of the actual information flows of a given application. We developed related communication architecture synthesis strategies and incorporated them into our quality-driven model-based multiprocessor design methodology and related automated architecture exploration framework. Using this framework we performed a large series of architecture synthesis experiments. Some of the results of the experiments are presented in this paper. They demonstrate many features of the synthesized communication architectures and show that our method and related framework are able to efficiently synthesize well scalable communication architectures even for the high-end massively parallel multiprocessors that have to satisfy extremely stringent computation demands. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.