title: Ephedrine QoS: an antidote to slow, congested, bufferless NoCs.
abstract: Datacenters consolidate diverse applications to improve utilization. However when multiple applications are colocated on such platforms, contention for shared resources like networks-on-chip (NoCs) can degrade the performance of latency-critical online services (high-priority applications). Recently proposed bufferless NoCs (Nychis et al.) have the advantages of requiring less area and power, but they pose challenges in quality-of-service (QoS) support, which usually relies on buffer-based virtual channels (VCs). We propose QBLESS, a QoS-aware bufferless NoC scheme for datacenters. QBLESS consists of two components: a routing mechanism (QBLESS-R) that can substantially reduce flit deflection for high-priority applications and a congestion-control mechanism (QBLESS-CC) that guarantees performance for high-priority applications and improves overall system throughput. We use trace-driven simulation to model a 64-core system, finding that, when compared to BLESS, a previous state-of-the-art bufferless NoC design, QBLESS, improves performance of high-priority applications by an average of 33.2% and reduces network-hops by an average of 42.8%.
authors.affiliation: College of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.affiliation: College of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China ; Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Zhicheng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.affiliation: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Xiufeng
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Sui
authors.affiliation: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Yungang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bao
mesh_terms: D000931:Antidotes; D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000639:trends*; D004809:Ephedrine; D011897:Random Allocation; D059015:Wireless Technology / Q000639:trends*
chemical_list: D000931:Antidotes; D004809:Ephedrine