Hermes: Architecting a top-performing fault-tolerant routing algorithm for networks-on-chips

Abstract

Networks-on-Chips (NoCs) are experiencing escalating susceptibility to wear-out and reduced reliability, with the risk of becoming the key point of failure in an entire multicore chip. In this paper we propose Hermes, a highly-robust, distributed fault-tolerant routing algorithm, whose performance degrades gracefully with increasing faulty NoC link counts. Hermes is a deadlock-free hybrid routing algorithm, utilizing load-balanced routing on fault-free paths, while providing pre-reconfigured escape routes in the vicinity of faults. An initial experimental evaluation shows that Hermes improves network throughput by up to 2.2× when compared against the existing state-of-the-art.