A NoC Traffic Suite Based on Real Applications

Abstract

As benchmark programs for microprocessor architectures, network-on-chip (NoC) traffic patterns are essential tools for NoC performance assessments and architecture explorations. The fidelity of NoC traffic patterns has profound influence on NoC studies. For the first time, this paper presents a realistic traffic benchmark suite, called MCSL, and the methodology used to generate it. The publicly released MCSL benchmark suite includes a set of realistic traffic patterns for 8 real applications and covers popular NoC architectures. It captures not only the communication behaviors in NoCs but also the temporal dependencies among them. MCSL benchmark suite can be easily incorporated into existing NoC simulators and significantly improve NoC simulation accuracy. We developed a systematic traffic generation methodology to create MCSL based on real applications. The methodology uses formal computational models to capture both communication and computation requirements of applications. It optimizes application mapping and scheduling to faithfully maximize overall system performance and utilization before extracting realistic traffic patterns through cycle-accurate simulations. Experiment results show that MCSL benchmark suite can be used to study NoC characteristics more accurately than traditional random traffic patterns.