Performance evaluation of a new hardware supported multicast scheme for k -ary n -cubes

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In this paper, we propose a new hardware tree-based routing algorithm (HTA) for multicast communication un- der virtual cut-through switching in k-ary n-cubes that out-performs existing software and hardware path-based multicast routing schemes. Simulation results are com- pared against several commonly used multicast routing al- gorithms and show that HTA performs extremely well under many different conditions. ordered at the source and does not always provide the short- est path between the source node and each destination node. In this paper, we propose a hardware tree-based routing algorithm (HTA) which attempts to reduce the probability of message blocking, resulting in low message latencies. The probability of a message blocking is kept low by using virtual cut-through switching, independent virtual channels (VCs) for unicast and multicast messages, several VCs per physical channel (PC), an efficient deadlock detection and recovery scheme, and delayed header flit routing. The Hard- ware Tree-based routing algorithm (HTA) is a fully adaptive and minimal tree-based routing scheme for multicast rout- ing. The scheme is fully compatible with existing unicast routing schemes. Although tree-based routing has not been seen in the past as very practical because of large block- ing probabilities, we demonstrate that it can be made very competitive by judicial combination of existing techniques in addition to the new concept of delayed header flit routing.