An integrated, programming model-driven framework for NoC-QoS support in cluster-based embedded many-cores

Embedded SoC designs are embracing the many-core paradigm to deliver the required performance to run an ever-increasing number of applications in parallel. Networks-on-Chip (NoC) are considered as a convenient technology to implement many-core embedded platforms. The complex and non-uniform nature of the traffic flows generated when multiple parallel applications are running simultaneously calls for Quality-of-Service (QoS) extensions in the NoC, but to efficiently exploit similar services it is necessary to expose them to the software in a easy-to-use yet efficient manner. In this paper we present an integrated hardware/software approach for delivering QoS on top of an hybrid OpenMP-MPI parallel programming model. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposal over a broad range of benchmarks and application mappings, demonstrating the ability to manage parallelism under QoS requirements effortlessly from the programming model. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.