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35th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'02)
Orion: A Power-Performance Simulator for Interconnection Networks
Istanbul, Turkey
November 18-November 22
ISBN: 0-7695-1959-1
Hang-Sheng Wang, Princeton University
Xinping Zhu, Princeton University
Li-Shiuan Peh, Princeton University
Sharad Malik, Princeton University
With the prevalence of server blades and systems-on-a- chip (SoCs), interconnection networks are becoming an important part of the microprocessor landscape. How-ever, there is limited tool support available for their de-sign. While performance simulators have been built that enable performance estimation while varying network parameters, these cover only one metric of interest in modern designs. System power consumption is increasingly becoming equally, if not more important than performance. It is now critical to get detailed power-performance tradeoff in-formation early in the microarchitectural design cycle. This is especially so as interconnection networks consume a significant fraction of total system power. It is exactly this gap that the work presented in this paper aims to fill.
We present Orion, a power-performance interconnection network simulator that is capable of providing de-tailed power characteristics, in addition to performance characteristics, to enable rapid power-performance tradeoffs at the architectural-level. This capability is provided within a general framework that builds a simulator starting from a microarchitectural specification of the interconnection network. A key component of this construction is the architectural-level parameterized power models that we have derived as part of this effort. Using component power models and a synthesized efficient power (and performance) simulator, a microarchitect can rapidly explore the design space. As case studies, we demonstrate the use of Orion in determining optimal system parameters, in examining the effect of diverse traffic conditions, as well as evaluating new network microarchitectures. In each of the above, the ability to simultaneously monitor power and performance is key in determining suitable microarchitectures.
Citation:
Hang-Sheng Wang, Xinping Zhu, Li-Shiuan Peh, Sharad Malik, "Orion: A Power-Performance Simulator for Interconnection Networks," micro, pp.294, 35th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'02), 2002
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