Reliability analysis of multilayer multistage interconnection networks

Abstract

Multistage interconnection networks (MINs) play a key role in the performance of parallel computers and multiprocessor systems. A non-negligible demand on today's modern systems is to deliver multicast traffic. Therefore, design of efficient MINs that meets the routing requirement is vital. One of the main ideas to cope with this problem is the use of replicated MINs. However, one of the major concerns about these networks is the problem of unnecessary layer replication in the first stages, which recently proposes a new idea called multilayer MINs. Previous analyzes demonstrated that this new idea could lead to cost-effective topologies that had a very close performance to the replicated MINs in terms of throughput. Also, these analyzes indicate that these networks outperform replicated MINs in terms of delay. However, another critical parameter to prove the performance of most systems is reliability. Therefore, in this paper, we will focus on two essential parameters of cost and reliability to achieve both objectives; first, evaluating the performance of multilayer MINs in terms of reliability, second, to find the best topology among the multilayer MINs introduced in previous works in terms of cost-effectiveness (mean time to failure/cost ratio).