An Effective Design of Deadlock-Free Routing Algorithms Based on 2D Turn Model for Irregular Networks

Abstract

System area networks (SANs), which usually accept arbitrary topologies, have been used to connect hosts in PC clusters. Although deadlock-free routing is often employed for low-latency communications using wormhole or virtual cut-through switching, the interconnection adaptivity introduces difficulties in establishing deadlock-free paths. An up*/down* routing algorithm, which has been widely used to avoid deadlocks in irregular networks, tends to make unbalanced paths as it employs a one-dimensional directed graph. The current study introduces a two-dimensional directed graph on which adaptive routings called left-up first turn (L-turn) routings and right-down last turn (R-turn) routings are proposed to make the paths as uniformly distributed as possible. This scheme guarantees deadlock-freedom because it uses the turn model approach, and the extra degree of freedom in the two-dimensional graph helps to ensure that the prohibited turns are well-distributed. Simulation results show that better throughput and latency results from uniformly distributing the prohibited turns by which the traffic would be more distributed toward the leaf nodes. The L-turn routings, which meet this condition, improve throughput by up to 100 percent compared with two up*/down*-based routings, and also reduce latency