Purlin: A Versatile Toolkit for Programmable On-Chip Network Generation and Simulation

Purlin is a versatile toolkit for the generation and simulation of programmable OCNs. We put forward a uniform network generation and simulation flow across distributed routing, source routing, and circuit-switched OCNs to enable effective trade-offs.

In this project, we call packet-switched OCNs as NoC, which is more commonly accepted. And we call circuit-switched OCNs as SwitchBox like which in FPGA.

Installing Necessary Dependencies

Package	Version
Java	≥ 8.0
Scala	≥ 2.12.10
Chisel	≥ 3.2.2
Verilator	≥ 3.916

Installing Scala

Install Scala either by installing an IDE such as IntelliJ, or sbt, Scala's build tool. You can install sbt in Ubuntu using following command:

echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/sbt/debian /" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sbt.list
curl -sL "https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x2EE0EA64E40A89B84B2DF73499E82A75642AC823" | sudo apt-key add
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sbt

It may take a few minutes.

Installing Chisel

Chisel will be installed automatically according to build.sbt the first time you run sbt.

Installing Verilator

To install Verilator as a package:

sudo apt-get install verilator

Project Tree

.
├── build.sbt                       //the library dependencies in sbt
├── PurlinTest                      //an empty folder for storing some results
├── README.md 
└── src
    └── main
        └── scala
            └── tetriski
                └── purlin
                    ├── NoC         //modules and testers of packet-switched network
                    ├── SwitchBox   //modules and testers of circuit-switched network
                    └── utils       //some utils, network models and algorithms

Quick Start

1.RTL Generation (in RTL/)

Generate a default 4x4 2-channel distributed routing packet-switched network with 32-bit payload:

make genDistributedRouting

Generate a default 4x4 2-channel source routing packet-switched network with 32-bit payload:

make genSourceRouting

Generate a default 4x4 2-channel circuit-switched network (Fs = 8) with 32-bit payload:

make genCircuitSwitched

2.Running Simulation

Explore a 2-channel 4x4 packet-switched distributed routing network under different injection rate:

make testInjectionRate

Explore suitable parameters and injection rate where other algorithms perform better than XY-routing:

make testAlgorithms

Compare packet-switched and circuit-switched 2-channel 4x4 networks:

make testNetworkCompare

3.Result Files

• globalRouting.json / globalRoutingResult.json

  The routing tasks or strategies. You can refer to utils.JsonIO.scala.

• *-DetailLatency.txt / latencyDistribution.txt

  The detail packet network latency of each packet, or the latency distribution.

• NoCTestingResults.txt

  The details of simulation results for packet-switched networks. You can refer to NoC.MeshNoCTest.scala.

Publications

For more detailed information and paper reference, please refer to the following papers: Yijiang Guo, Xinming Wei, Jiaxi Zhang and Guojie Luo, "Purlin: A Versatile Toolkit for the Generation and Simulation of On-Chip Network", 2022 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), October 2022.

@article{guo-purlin-iccd2022,
  title   = "{Purlin: A Versatile Toolkit for the Generation and Simulation of On-Chip Network}",
  author  = {Yijiang Guo and Xinming Wei and Jiaxi Zhang and Guojie Luo},
  journal = {2022 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD)},
  month   = {October},
  year    = {2022},
}