Clustering-based simultaneous task and voltage scheduling for NoC systems

Abstract

Networks-on-chip (NoC) is emerging as a promising communication structure, which is scalable with respect to chip complexity. Meanwhile, latest chip designs are increasingly leveraging multiple voltage-frequency domains for energy-efficiency improvement. In this work, we propose a simultaneous task and voltage scheduling algorithm for energy minimization in NoC based designs. The energy-latency tradeoff is handled by Lagrangian relaxation. The core algorithm is a clustering based approach which not only assigns voltage levels and starting time to each task (or Processing Element) but also naturally finds voltage-frequency clusters. Compared to a recent previous work, which performs task scheduling and voltage assignment sequentially, our method leads to an average of 20% energy reduction.