Reasoning about a NoC

Thinking about a Network-on-Chip system and what its system software needs to do…

• Parallelisation is essential to efficiency – in a NoC there are a multitude of cores, but each core has only the fraction of the computational power a “traditional” unicore might be expected to have – therefore it is essential that, where possible, code is parallelised across as many cores as possible;
• Each core needs to be able to access operating system services (via system calls or some other mechanism), but it is not necessarily the case that each core has to run a full or even a partial operating system – thus RPC or some other mechanism can be used to ‘remotely’ provide system services;
• Application programmers want, above all, a single address space.

 

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