Performance analysis of multistage interconnection networks using a multicast algorithm

Abstract

Studies issues of multicasting in multistage interconnection networks (MINs) for large-scale multicomputers. In addition to point-to-point communication among the processing nodes, efficient collective communication is critical to the performance of multicomputers. This paper presents a new approach to support multicast communication, on the basis of a restricted address encoding scheme which constructs a short fixed-size multicast header, and a recursive scheme that recycles a multicast packet one or more times through the network to send it to the desire destination nodes. We propose a novel deadlock-free multicast algorithm for multiple multicast packets in MIN-based multicomputers. We also present a performance model for the unbuffered MIN using the multicast algorithm and analyze its performance in terms of the network throughput, where several multicast communications are considered.