Abstract

Switch allocation and queuing discipline has a first-order impact on network performance and hence overall system performance. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental tension between quality of switch allocation and clock-speed. On one hand, sophisticated switch allocators such as iSLIP include dependencies that make pipelining hard. On the other hand, simpler allocators which are pipelineable (and hence amenable to fast clocks) degrade throughput.

This paper proposes apSLIP which uses three novel ideas to adaptively pipeline iSLIP at fast clocks. To address the dependence between the grant and request stages in iSLIP, we allow superfluous requests to occur and leverage the VOQ architecture which naturally enables easy availing of the corresponding grants. To address the dependence between the reading and updating of priority counters in iSLIP, we use stale priority values and solve the resulting double booking by privatizing the priority counters and separating the arbitration into odd and even stream. Further, we observe that while iSLIP can exploit multiple iterations to improve its matching strength, such additional iterations deepen the pipeline and add to the network latency. The improved matching strength helps high-load scenarios whereas the increased latency hurts low-load cases. Therefore, we propose an adaptive-effort pipelined iSLIP – apSLIP – which adapts between one iteration (shallow-pipeline) at low loads and two iterations (deep pipeline) at high loads. Simulations reveal that compared to an aggressive 2-cycle router apSLIP improves, on average, end-to-end packet latency in an 8x8 network by 43% and high-load application performance in a 3x3 network by 19% without affecting the low-load benchmarks.

Date of this Version

10-28-2013

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