Heterogeneous Hardware Accelerators Interconnect: An Overview

In this paper, we present an overview of interconnect solutions for hardware accelerator systems. A number of solutions are presented: bus-based, DMA, crossbar, NoC, as well as combinations of these. The paper proposes analytical models to predict the performance of these solutions and implements them in practice. The jpeg decoder application is implemented as our case study in different scenarios using the presented interconnect solutions. We profile the application to extract the input data for our analytical model. Measurement results show that the NoC solution combined with a bus-based system provides the best performance as predicted by the analytical models. The NoC solution achieves a speed-up of up to 2.4x compared to the bus-based system, while consuming the least amount of energy. However, the NoC has the highest resource usage of up to 20.7% overhead.