More is Less: Denial-of-Service Attacks and Solutions in Many-Core On-Chip Networks

A many-core system is expected to outperform a traditional single-core system by enabling multiple applications to be executed on separate cores in parallel, given the generous assumption that the execution of an application on one core does not interfere with an application on other cores. Regrettably, this optimistic belief about independence of different applications turns out widely untrue in practice. Interdependencies and contention between cores abound in many core systems, most prominently caused by a set of shared resources, ranging from on-chip networks, shared memories/ disks, to controller buffers etc.