MCSL
Realistic Network-on-Chip Traffic Patterns
As programs for microprocessor architectures, NoC traffic patterns are essential tools for NoC performance assessments and design explorations. The fidelity of NoC traffic patterns has profound influence on NoC studies. This project develops MCSL (multi-constraint system-level) NoC traffic patterns for NoC design and exploration.
Project Member: Zhongyuan Tian, Jiang Xu, Shixi Chen, Xiao Li, Bin Li (Intel), Ravi Iyer (Intel), Ramesh Illikkal (Intel)
Maintained by: Zhongyuan Tian (ztianab@connect.ust.hk). If there is any inquiry or suggestion, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Past Member: Zhe Wang, Weichen Liu, Rafael Kioji Vivas Maeda, Xiaowen Wu, Peng Yang, Zhehui Wang, Xuan Wang, Yaoyao Ye, Mahdi Nikdast, Luan H.K. Duong
OVERVIEW
MCSL NoC traffic patterns are based on real applications and covers mesh, torus, and fat-tree NoC architectures. They capture the following key aspects of real applications.
- Temporal and spatial communication behaviors
- Computation tasks
- Memory usages
MCSL NoC traffic patterns can be easily incorporated into an NoC or multicore/many-core simulator using the included traffic loader. It is generated by a systematic traffic generation methodology. The methodology uses formal computational models to capture communication, computation, and memory requirements of real applications. It optimizes application mapping and scheduling and memory usages to faithfully maximize overall system performance and utilization before extracting realistic traffic patterns. Experiment results show that MCSL NoC traffic patterns can be used to study NoC characteristics more accurately than traditional random traffic patterns. Current version includes the following applications, and more applications will be added in the coming months.
| Application | Description | Tasks | Communication Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| RS-32_28_8_enc | Reed-Solomon code encoder with codeword format RS(32,28,8). | 262 | 348 |
| RS-32_28_8_dec | Reed-Solomon code decoder with codeword format RS(32,28,8). | 182 | 392 |
| H264-720p_dec | H.264 video decoder with a resolution of 720p. | 2311 | 3461 |
| H264-1080p_dec | H.264 video decoder with a resolution of 1080p. | 5191 | 7781 |
| ROBOT | Newton-Euler dynamic control calculation for the 6-degrees-of-freedom Stanford manipulator. | 88 | 131 |
| FPPPP | SPEC95 Fpppp is a chemical program performing multi-electron integral derivatives. | 334 | 1145 |
| FFT-1024_complex | Fast Fourier transform with 1024 inputs of complex numbers. | 16384 | 25600 |
| SPARSE | Random sparse matrix solver for electronic circuit simulations. | 96 | 67 |
Download User Manual
Or you can download the full package directly.
Download MCSL 1.6 (146MB)
AGREEMENT
MCSL NoC Traffic Patterns are made openly available under the following license. Please cite the following paper if it is used.
- Weichen Liu, Jiang Xu, Xiaowen Wu, Yaoyao Ye, Xuan Wang, Wei Zhang, Mahdi Nikdast, Zhehui Wang, “A NoC Traffic Suite Based on Real Applications,” IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), July 2011. [PDF]
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright © 2007-2022 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met.
- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
- Neither the name of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.