SC Conference - Activity Details

George Michelogiannakis  (Stanford University)

William J. Dally  (Stanford University)

Networking

Wednesday,  04:00PM - 04:30PM

Room PB252

This paper explores the design space of elastic buffer (EB) routers by evaluating three representative designs. We propose an enhanced two-stage EB router which maximizes throughput by achieving a 42% reduction in cycle time and 20% reduction in occupied area by using look-ahead routing and replacing the three-slot output EBs in the baseline router of [17] with two-slot EBs. We also propose a single-stage router which merges the two pipeline stages to avoid pipelining overhead.This design reduces zero-load latency by 24% compared to the enhanced two-stage router if both are operated at the same clock frequency; moreover, the single-stage router reduces the required energy per transferred bit and occupied area by 29% and 30% respectively, compared to the enhanced two-stage router. However, the cycle time of the enhanced two-stage router is 26% smaller than that of the single-stage router.

The full paper can be found in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Computer Society