Evaluating effects of thermal management in wireless NoC-enabled multicore architectures

Massive multicore processors are enablers for many information and communication technology (ICT) innovations spanning various domains, including healthcare, defense, and entertainment. In the design of high-performance massive multicore chips, power and heat are dominant constraints. The increasing power consumption is of growing concern due to several reasons, e.g., cost, performance, reliability, scalability, and environmental impact. As we demand more from our computing systems, they will be limited by power, energy, and thermal constraints. Without new paradigms of energy-efficient designs, producing ICT systems capable of meeting the computing, storage, and communication demands of emerging applications will be unlikely. Architectural innovation in conjunction with suitable power and thermal management strategies is the key for designing high performance yet energy-efficient massive multicore chips. Our main contribution here is to demonstrate that incorporating Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) on a multicore chip designed with long-range wireless shortcuts improves the thermal profile while simultaneously providing lower latency and reduced network energy compared to a conventional mesh-based counterpart.