Combined routing and scheduling of concurrent communication traffic in hypercube multicomputers

Abstract

We propose and evaluate low-complexity, low-overhead schemes for distributed message scheduling and routing in binary hypercube multicomputers equipped with a hardware communication adapter at each node. The goal is to optimize the network performance not only for steady traffic flow, but also for concurrent bursty traffic. We comparatively evaluate the performance of different scheduling-coding combinations for several switching methods, such as message switching, circuit switching and virtual cut-through. The evaluation results have indicated that in case of heavy transient traffic, a partially-adaptive routing scheme, when combined with an appropriate message-scheduling policy, can outperform a fully-adaptive routing scheme.