High Performance Computing Architecture with Security

Abstract

Multi-processor embedded system is the future promise of high performance computing architecture. However, it still suffers low network efficiency and security threat. Simply upgrading to multi-core systems has been proven to provide only minor speedup compared with single core systems. Router architecture of network-on-chip (NoC) uses shared input buffers such as virtual channels and crossbar switches that only allow sequential data access. The speed and efficiency of on-chip communication is limited. In addition, the performance of conventional NoC topology is limited by routing latency and energy consumption due to its network diameter increases with the rising number of nodes. The security concern has also become a serious problem for embedded systems. Even with cryptographic algorithms, embedded systems are still very vulnerable to side channel attacks (SCAs). Among SCA approaches, power analysis is an efficient and powerful attack. Once the encryption location in an instruction sequence is identified, power analysis can be applied to exploit the embedded system. To improve on-chip network parallelism, this dissertation proposes a new router microarchitecture based on a new data structure called virtual collision array. Sequential data requests are partially eliminated in the virtual collision array before entering router pipeline. To facilitate the new router architecture, new workload assignment is applied to increase data request elimination. Through a task flow partitioning algorithm, we minimize sequential data access and then schedule tasks while minimizing the total router delay. For NoC topology, this dissertation presents a new hybrid NoC (HyNoC) architecture. We introduce an adaptive routing scheme to provide reconfigurable on-chip communication with both wired and wireless links. In addition, based on a mathematical model which established on cross-correlation, this dissertation proposes two obfuscation methodologies: Real Instruction Insertion and AES Mimic to prevent SCAs power analysis attack.