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Type: Theses
Title: Mapping of processing elements of hardware-based production systems on networks on chip
Author: Numan, Mostafa Wasiuddin
Issue Date: 2017
School/Discipline: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Abstract: This thesis investigates network on chip (NoC) architecture, most particularly, NoC mapping algorithms for homogeneous processing elements of a system on chip (SoC) designed for AI and cognitive computing. Production systems are used in cognitive architectures and knowledge-based systems to produce appropriate reasoning behaviours bymatching the symbolic information of the environment with the production rules stored in their knowledge bases. General purpose computers are not specifically manufactured for the purpose of continuous matching involved in production systems, and often fail to deliver the performance and speed required in real-time applications. A reconfigurable and parallel computer architecture, named the Street Processor, has been developed by the research group of which the author is a member, to address the performance gap. The processor has its own instruction set, called the Street language, to define the production rules. The production rules are implemented on simple and identical PEs of the Street Processor that conduct the matching operations in parallel and asynchronously. Special steps can be taken to make these operations synchronous if required. Two artificial agents demonstrate the capability of the Street Processor, and are also used as test cases to measure the performance of NoC mapping techniques. The Street Processor is expected to contain thousands of fine-grained homogeneous PEs to build a complex cognitive agent. To make the continuous and simultaneous communication among the PEs more efficient, a regular and generic NoC architecture is considered in this work. The network architecture allows multiple PEs to be associated with a single NoC router to optimise its resources. The mapping of PEs to NoC routers, which is an NP-hard optimisation problem, is addressed in this work using two alternative approaches. The Branch and Bound (BB) and Simulated Annealing (SA) techniques are analysed for use as a preferred mapping technique. Although the BB technique provides amapping solution faster than SA, the latter is considered more promising for large systems, e.g. the Street Processor, since BB achieves the computation time advantage at the cost of a high memory requirement. To reduce the computation time of the SA method by shrinking the search space, the dependency graph, which captures the communication volume among PEs over a period of time, is partitioned into smaller groups of PEs (GPEs). By assigning each GPE to a router, this approach also reduces the number of required routers and the interrouter traffic of the network. A Priority-based Simulated Annealing (PSA) technique is proposed, which takes advantages of the relative placements of the routers and interdependencies of the GPEs to determine a heuristic initial mapping to start annealing. The experiments show that this approach significantly improves the computation time for finding a solution without sacrificing mapping quality. Considering the inherent memory utilisation advantage over the BB technique, and the computation time improvement over the original SA technique, the proposed approach is suggested to be the most suitable for NoC mapping for the Street Processor and similar homogeneous SoCs.
Advisor: Liebelt, Michael J.
Phillips, Braden Jace
Dissertation Note: Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2017.
Keywords: network on chip
mapping optimisation
branch and bound
simulated annealing
artificial intelligence
cognitive system
production system
Provenance: This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals
DOI: 10.4225/55/5b10b356b84c5
Appears in Collections:Research Theses

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