A HEURISTIC FOR OPTIMIZING THE PHYSICAL LAYOUT AND NETWORK TOPOLOGY OF INTEGRATED 3D MULTI-CHIP SYSTEMS UNDER TEMPERATURE CONSTRAINTS
A HEURISTIC FOR OPTIMIZING THE PHYSICAL LAYOUT AND NETWORK TOPOLOGY OF INTEGRATED 3D MULTI-CHIP SYSTEMS UNDER TEMPERATURE CONSTRAINTS
Date
2018-12
Authors
Leong, Lambert
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Casanova, Henri
Department
Computer Science
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Abstract
Many-core architectures provide large amounts of computational power and should thus
be well-suited to running parallel applications. In this context, Integrated 3D multi-chip
systems comprise multiple multi-core processor chips in a single tightly-coupled system. Heat
dissipation is a major issue when designing integrated 3D multi-chip systems. It may not be
possible to operate chips at their maximum frequency due to their being in close proximity
to each other, which impedes heat dissipation. The physical layout of the chips is thus
an important design consideration, also because it impacts the inter-chip network topology
since a sparser physical layout can imply a less tightly-connected topology. Overall, there is a
complex trade-off between between temperature, physical layout, chip operating frequencies,
and inter-chip network topologies.
The ThruChip Interface (TCI) makes wireless communications between processor chips
possible via inductive coupling, and thus can be used to construct inter-chip networks.
Inductive coupling offers economical advantages (e.g., ability to produce/test individual
chips before their are integrated in a multi-chip system), while also providing sufficient
bandwidth between communicating chips with low power consumption. Furthermore, this
technology makes it possible to construct integrated 3D multi-chip systems using a wide
range of physical layout options: it is only necessary for two chips to overlap for them to
be connected, the network bandwidth being proportional to the overlap area. In this thesis
we assume the use of TCI and focus on building integrated 3D multi-chip systems using
physical chip layouts that afford good heat dissipation, high chip operating frequencies, and
good inter-chip network topologies. This amounts to solving a constrained multi-objective
optimization problem. Previously proposed physical layouts for integrated 3D multi-chip
systems include the “stack,” which consist of multiple chips stacked vertically above one
another, and the “checkerboard,” which consists of chips connected via partial overlaps at
each of the four corners so as to resemble a checkerboard when viewed from above. These
baseline layouts provide poor (in the case of the stack) or likely improvable (in the case of
the checkerboard) solutions to the aforementioned optimization problem.
We propose a randomized greedy heuristic to construct layouts that are superior to the
baseline layouts both in terms of compute power and network topology. This heuristic
relies on the Hotspot simulator to evaluate the temperature of candidate layouts. Hotspot
simulations are computationally intensive, and we use various techniques that make our
approach feasible in spite of the Hotspot bottleneck. We present results achieved by our
ivheuristic when generating 6-, 9-, and 13-chips layouts and compare these results to the
checkerboard layout. Our results show that the heuristic-generated layouts are strictly
superior to the baseline checkerboard layout, typically affording significantly improved compute
power. Our key finding is that a randomized greedy heuristic is sufficient to generate
layouts for integrated 3D multi-chip systems that afford increased performance to parallel
applications when compared to previously proposed state-of-the-art layouts.
Description
Keywords
Computer science,
Hotspot,
Inductive Coupling,
Integrated 3D Multi-Chip System
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69 pages
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