The impact of synchronization in message passing while scaling multi-core MPSoC systems

Several previous works have already stressed the impact and importance of the performance of message passing directives for MPSoC platforms. In this paper we present a set of algorithms to perform synchronization in message-based communication in a multicore, NoC-based MPSoC environment. A scalable MPSoC architecture was implemented using SystemC, being composed by a set of MIPS cores available in Open-Cores. Data regarding the energy, contention and number of messages for each communication channel were collected. The data collected show differences in performance for the algorithms under different topologies. This suggests the necessity of properly choosing the most suitable synchronization algorithm for each combination of topology and workload. We also show how contention affects the communication resources of the platform.