Alleviation of Tree Saturation in Multistage Interconnection Networks

This paper presents an examination of two distinct but complementary extensions of previous work on hot spot contention in multistage interconnection networks. The first extension focuses on the use of larger queues at the memory modules than are traditionally studied. The second extension explores a simple feedback damping scheme, which we refer to as bleeding, which allows selected processors to ignore feedback information. The impact of memory queue size, feedback threshold value, and bleeding on system performance (specifically maximum bandwidth per processor) is evaluated by analyzing the results of extensive network simulations. These results indicate that combining these approaches can significantly improve the effective bandwidth of a multistage interconnection network. 1. Introduction In order to achieve the goal of teraflop computing speeds by the end of the century, the number of processing nodes in a multiprocessor will have to increase substantially. However, as the numb..