QBLESS: A case for QoS-aware bufferless NoCs

Datacenters consolidate diverse applications to improve utilization. However when multiple applications are co-located 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 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%.