Path coverings with prescribed ends in faulty hypercubes

We discuss the existence of vertex disjoint path coverings with prescribed ends for the $n$-dimensional hypercube with or without deleted vertices. Depending on the type of the set of deleted vertices and desired properties of the path coverings we establish the minimal integer $m$ such that for every $n \ge m$ such path coverings exist. Using some of these results, for $k \le 4$, we prove Locke's conjecture that a hypercube with $k$ deleted vertices of each parity is Hamiltonian if $n \ge k +2.$ Some of our lemmas substantially generalize known results of I. Havel and T. Dvo\v{r}\'{a}k. At the end of the paper we formulate some conjectures supported by our results.Comment: 26 page

Wildcard dimensions, coding theory and fault-tolerant meshes and hypercubes

Hypercubes, meshes and tori are well known interconnection networks for parallel computers. The sets of edges in those graphs can be partitioned to dimensions. It is well known that the hypercube can be extended by adding a wildcard dimension resulting in a folded hypercube that has better fault-tolerant and communication capabilities. First we prove that the folded hypercube is optimal in the sense that only a single wildcard dimension can be added to the hypercube. We then investigate the idea of adding wildcard dimensions to d-dimensional meshes and tori. Using techniques from error correcting codes we construct d-dimensional meshes and tori with wildcard dimensions. Finally, we show how these constructions can be used to tolerate edge and node faults in mesh and torus networks