Torus Ring: Improving Interconnection Network Performance by Modifying Hierarchical Ring

Abstract

In this letter, we propose Ring, which is a modified version of 2-level hierarchical ring. The Torus Ring has the same complexity as the hierarchical rings, since the only difference is the way it connects the local rings. It has an advantage over the hierarchical ring when the destination of a packet is the adjacent local ring, especially to the backward direction. Although we assume that the destination of a network packet is uniformly distributed across the processing nodes, the average number of hops in Torus Ring is equal to that of the hierarchical ring. However, the performance gain of the Torus Ring is expected to increase, due to the spatial locality of the application programs in the real parallel programming environment. In the simulation results, latencies of the interconnection network are reduced by up to 19%, with moderate ring utilization ratios.