Development and Implementation of a File System for Gannet Virtual ...

Figure 2.2 Service-based SoC Node (Vanderbauwhede, 2007a)
The transceiver module within the service node contains transmit and receive FIFOs
buffer. Moreover, it allows custom implementation depending on the interconnect
technology type. The service nodes exchange the data information as packets. The
transceiver encapsulates the Gannet packet on a data link-layer frame. Encapsulated
established by the deployment of the communication network on-chip. The way it
encapsulates is very similar with OSI 7 - layer model but the way it works is very
different. As the OSI focuses on quality of service and error control, on the other
hand, network on-chip protocol focuses on the efficiency and the effectively the data
is being transferred from one point to another endpoint (Kogel, 2006).
The service reconfigure manager manages the data required and produced by the
service core. Service node behaves in a “functional” way as they only interact with
the system through the service manager and are stateless (Vanderbauwhede,
2006a). Thus, every service will produce identical output for identical inputs and no
side-effects. However, this functional behavior accommodates the enable of large-
scale parallelism and self-managed distributed processing.
The service manager has a local memory for storing the task description and data
required by the core. The memory allocation is independent and managed by the
service manager. It also acts as a bridge which connects service node with the
service manager in order to exchange the data. Therefore, service node is task-
agnostic and the service manager is unaware of the nature of the service.
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