Power consumption in interconnection networks has becomean increasingly important architectural issue. The links which interconnect network node routers are a major consumer of power and will devour an ever-increasing portion of total available power as network bandwidth and operating frequencies upscale. In this paper we propose a dynamic power management policy where network links areturned off and switched back on depending on network utilizationin a distributed fashion. We have devised a systematic approachbased on the derivation of a connectivity graph that balancespower and performance for a 2D mesh topology. This coupled with adeadlock-free, fully-adaptive routing algorithm guarantees packetdelivery. Our approach realizes up to 37.5% reduction in overallnetwork link power for an 8-ary 2-mesh topology with a moderatenetwork latency increase.
Keywords:
Low power networking
Gb/sec and Tb/sec switching and routing technologies