  Multi-threaded applications are capable of exploiting the full potential of
many-core systems. However, Network-on-Chip (NoC) based inter-core
communication in many-core systems is responsible for 60-75% of the miss
latency experienced by multi-threaded applications. Delay in the arrival of
critical data at the requesting core severely hampers performance. This brief
presents some interesting insights about how critical data is requested from
the memory by multi-threaded applications. Then it investigates the cause of
delay in NoC and how it affects the performance. Finally, this brief shows how
NoC-aware memory access optimisations can significantly improve performance.
Our experimental evaluation considers early restart memory access optimisation
and demonstrates that by exploiting NoC resources, critical data can be
prioritised to reduce miss penalty by 10-12% and improve system performance by
7-11%.
