Distributed routing balancing for interconnection network communication

Abstract

An efficient design of the interconnection network is crucial because of its impact on the parallel computer performance. A high speed routing scheme that minimises contention and avoids the formation of hot-spots should be included in the design. We have developed a new method to uniformly balance communication traffic over the interconnection network called distributed routing balancing (DRB) that is based on limited and load-controlled path expansion in order to maintain a low message latency. The method uniformly distributes the communication load between all links of the interconnection network and maintains latency control provided that total bandwidth requirements do not exceed total available link bandwidth in the interconnection network. DRB defines how to create alternative paths to expand single paths (expanded path definition) and when to use them depending on traffic load (expanded path selection carried out by DRB routing). Some conclusions of the experimentation and comparisons with existing methods are given. It is demonstrated that DRB is a method to effectively balance network traffic.