YOMNA – An efficient deadlock-free multicast wormhole algorithm in 2-D mesh multicomputers

Abstract

Abstract A mesh network is a popular architecture which has been implemented in many multicomputer systems. It is preferred because it offers useful edge connectivity and is partitioned into units that are still meshes. It is also scalable and has a number of features that make it particularly amenable to high-performance computing. The 2-D mesh topology has become increasingly important to multicomputer design because of its many desirable properties including scalability, low bandwidth and fixed degree of nodes . The essential pattern in new multicomputer generations is the multicast wormhole pattern, which corresponds to one-to-many communication in which one source sends the same message to multiple destination nodes. In wormhole routing, a message is decomposed into words or flits , and flits of one message may be spread out among several nodes. Deadlock in the interconnection network occurs when no message can advance towards its destination. Some deadlock -free routing algorithms for wormhole routing were proposed, but the network latency and the network traffic were not taken into consideration. An optimal message routing should achieve both minimum traffic and minimum latency for the communication patterns involved. Unfortunately, finding optimal message routing has been shown to be NP-hard for most common multicomputer topologies. In this paper, an efficient algorithm (YOMNA) is introduced to find a deadlock-free multicast wormhole routing in 2-D mesh parallel machines. YOMNA algorithm is a tree-based technique, in which the router simultaneously sends incoming flits on more than one outgoing channel. YOMNA algorithm is compared with the dual-path multicast routing, which is a path-based technique. YOMNA algorithm has proved to be deadlock free. The network latency and the network traffic are calculated for YOMNA algorithm and for the dual-path multicast routing. The results demonstrate that YOMNA algorithm outperformed the dual-path routing.