Adaptive routing in k-ary n-cube multicomputers

Wormhole routing makes the communication latency insensitive of the network diameter and reduces the buffer size of each router. It has been widely adopted in many new generation Distributed memory multiprocessor systems (DMMPs). The concept of virtual system is invented for deadlock-free routing design. Using a great deal of virtual channels is quite expensive to be implemented in practice and is not limitless. In this paper, experimental results are given to evaluate the tradeoff between network congestion delay and throughput. Some results show that the congestion delay does not reduce visibly when the number of virtual channels is great than that of internal channels by 2. A reasonable number of virtual channels can be derived from the results. A virtual networks system using only four virtual networks, two virtual channels in each direction, is presented. It shows that the minimum number of virtual networks to support a partially adaptive, minimal and deadlock free routing in k-ary n-cubes is just four. It uses only four virtual networks but can get a high degree of adaptiveness and high traffic capacity. Simulation results are presented to verify the performance.