Efficient Termination Detection for Loosely Synchronous Applications in Multicomputers

We propose a simple algorithm which is based on edge-coloring of system graphs for termination detection of loosely synchronous computations. The proposed algorithm is fully symmetric in that all processors run syntactically identical code and can detect global termination at the same time. Under the 1-port communication model, the algorithm is optimal in terms of termination delay, the difference between the time when a global termination occurs and the time it is detected, in a number of structures---chain, ring of even number of nodes, k-ary n-cube and k-ary n-mesh of low degree, where k is even; and near-optimal for other cases. The optimality analysis is based on results from a related problem, periodic gossiping in edge-colored graphs. This algorithm has been applied to some practical cases in which the overhead due to its execution is found to be insignificant. Index Terms---data parallelism, distributed algorithms, interconnection networks, multicomputers, parallel and distri..