Evaluating the communications capabilities of the generalized hypercube interconnection network

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper presents results of evaluating the communications capabilities of the generalized hypercube interconnection network. The generalized hypercube has outstanding topological properties, but it has not been implemented on a large scale because of its very high wiring complexity. For this reason, this network has not been studied extensively in the past. However, recent and expected technological advancements will soon render this network viable for massively parallel systems. We first present implementations of randomized manyto-all broadcasting and multicasting on generalized hypercubes, using as the basis the oneto-all broadcast algorithm presented by Fragopoulou et al. (1996). We test the proposed implementations under realistic communication traffic patterns and message generations, for the all-port model of communication. Our results show that the size of the intermediate message buffers has a significant effect on the total communication time, and this effect becomes very dramatic for large systems with large numbers of dimensions. We also propose a modification of this multicast algorithm that applies congestion control to improve its performance. The results illustrate a significant improvement in the total execution time and a reduction in the number of message contentions, and also prove that the generalized hypercube is a very versatile interconnection network. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.