Probabilistic Distance-Based Arbitration: Providing Equality of Service for Many-Core CMPs

Abstract--Emerging many-core chip multiprocessors will integrate dozens of small processing cores with an on-chip interconnect consisting of point-to-point links. The interconnect enables the processing cores to not only communicate, but to share common resources such as main memory resources and I/O controllers. In this work, we propose an arbitration scheme to enable equality of service (EoS) in access to a chip's shared resources. That is, we seek to remove any bias in a core's access to a shared resource based on its location in the CMP. We propose using probabilistic arbitration combined with distance-based weights to achieve EoS and overcome the limitation of conventional round-robin arbiter. We describe how nonlinear weights need to be used with probabilistic arbiters and propose three different arbitration weight metrics

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Michael M. Lee, John Kim, Dennis Abts, Michael R. Marty, Jae W. Lee
• Keywords: Arbitration, Arbitration Scheme, Hardware, MICRO 2010, Shared Resource