2]. The Cell Processor from Sony, Toshiba and IBM (STI) 3], and the Sun UltraSPARC T1 (formerly codenamed Niagara) 4] signal the growing popularity of such systems. Furthermore, Intel's very recently announced 80-core TeraFLOP chip 5] exemplifies the irreversible march toward many-core systems with tens or even hundreds of processing elements. 1.2 The Dawn of the Communication-Centric Revolution The multi-core thrust has ushered the gradual displacement of the computati- centric design model by a more communication-centric approach 6]. The large, sophisticated monolithic modules are...