Scaling High-Performance Interconnect Architectures to Many-Core Systems

To my wife Shetia and my son Kaden ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First off, I would like to thank God for putting me in the position that I am in today. As any Ph.D student knows, there are many times where the academic grind and struggle of completing a doctoral degree seems overwhelming. Thus, I have to thank God for putting the right people in my life to keep me going and giving me the peace of mind of knowing that He put me at Michigan for a reason. My faith was truly a key factor in persevering and persisting through this process. Next, I have to say thank you to my two advisors during my time at Michigan. Pro-fessor Trevor Mudge and Professor Steve Reinhardt were instrumental in facilitating my development as a student, allowing me to explore interesting research projects, and most importantly supporting me through life. It was refreshing and invaluable to have advisors who supported my ideas and challenged me to prove whether ideas were worthwhile or not. My favorite Steve quote is “It’s necessarily complex... ” while my favorite Trev quotes are: “We’ve been doing it for years...It’s called computers! ” and “(insert lab member’s name here), You’ve got to think!” I have to thank all my labmates for being a great support system. The “m5/gem5 ” team– Nate Binkert, Ali Saidi, Ron Dreslinski, Kevin Lim, Lisa Hsu, and Gabe Black–introduced me to a level of software and simulator development that can only be referenced as “awe-some”. I learned so much from you all and I thank you for helping me build a skill se