TAPP: Temperature-aware application mapping for NoC-based many-core processors

Application mapping with its ability to spread out high-power components can potentially be a good approach to mitigate the looming issue of hotspots in many-core processors. However, very few works have explored effective ways of making tradeoff between temperature and network latency. Moreover, on-chip routers, which are of high power density and may lead to hotspots, are not considered in these works. In this paper, we propose TAPP (Temperature-Aware Partitioning and Placement), an efficient application mapping algorithm to reduce on-chip hotspots while sacrificing little network performance. This algorithm “spreads” high-power cores and routers across the chip by performing hierarchical bi-partitioning of the cores and concurrently conducting placement of the cores onto tiles, and achieves high efficiency and superior scalability. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the temperature by up to 6.80°C with minimal latency increase compared to the latency-oriented mapping solution.