Energy-Performance Modeling and Optimization of Parallel Computing in On-Chip Networks

This paper discusses energy-performance trade-off of networks-on-chip with real parallel applications. First, we propose an accurate energy-performance analytical model that conduct and analyze the impacts of both frequency-independent and frequency-dependent power. Second, we put together the communication overhead, memory access overhead, frequency scaling, and core count scaling to quantify the performance and energy consumed by NoCs. Third, we propose a new energy-performance optimization method, by choosing a pair of frequency and core count to get optimal energy or performance. Finally, we implement eight PARSEC parallel applications to evaluate our model and the optimization method. The experiment result confirms that our model predicts NoCs energy and performance well, and selects correct frequency level and core count for most parallel applications.