Permutation Routing in the Hypercube and Grid Topologies

The problem of edge disjoint path routing arises from applications in distributed memory parallel computing. We examine this problem in both the directed hypercube and two-dimensional grid topologies. Complexity results are obtained for these problems where the routing must consist entirely of shortest length paths. Additionally, approximation algorithms are presented for the case when the routing request is of a special form known as a permutation. Permutations simply require that no vertex in the graph may be used more than once as either a source or target for a routing request. Szymanski conjectured that permutations are always routable in the directed hypercube, and this remains an open problem

Investigation of the robustness of star graph networks

The star interconnection network has been known as an attractive alternative to n-cube for interconnecting a large number of processors. It possesses many nice properties, such as vertex/edge symmetry, recursiveness, sublogarithmic degree and diameter, and maximal fault tolerance, which are all desirable when building an interconnection topology for a parallel and distributed system. Investigation of the robustness of the star network architecture is essential since the star network has the potential of use in critical applications. In this study, three different reliability measures are proposed to investigate the robustness of the star network. First, a constrained two-terminal reliability measure referred to as Distance Reliability (DR) between the source node u and the destination node I with the shortest distance, in an n-dimensional star network, Sn, is introduced to assess the robustness of the star network. A combinatorial analysis on DR especially for u having a single cycle is performed under different failure models (node, link, combined node/link failure). Lower bounds on the special case of the DR: antipode reliability, are derived, compared with n-cube, and shown to be more fault-tolerant than n-cube. The degradation of a container in a Sn having at least one operational optimal path between u and I is also examined to measure the system effectiveness in the presence of failures under different failure models. The values of MTTF to each transition state are calculated and compared with similar size containers in n-cube. Meanwhile, an upper bound under the probability fault model and an approximation under the fixed partitioning approach on the ( n-1)-star reliability are derived, and proved to be similarly accurate and close to the simulations results. Conservative comparisons between similar size star networks and n-cubes show that the star network is more robust than n-cube in terms of ( n-1)-network reliability

Routing permutations and 2–1 routing requests in the hypercube

AbstractLet Hn be the directed symmetric n-dimensional hypercube. Using the computer, we show that for any permutation of the vertices of H4, there exists a system of pairwise arc-disjoint directed paths from each vertex to its target in the permutation. This verifies Szymanski's conjecture (Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Processing, 1989, pp. I-103–I-110) for n=4. We also consider the so-called 2–1 routing requests in Hn, where any vertex can be used twice as a source but only once as a target; we construct for any n⩾3 a 2–1 request that cannot be routed in Hn by arc-disjoint paths: in other words, for n⩾3, Hn is not (2–1)-rearrangeable

Optimal Networks from Error Correcting Codes

To address growth challenges facing large Data Centers and supercomputing clusters a new construction is presented for scalable, high throughput, low latency networks. The resulting networks require 1.5-5 times fewer switches, 2-6 times fewer cables, have 1.2-2 times lower latency and correspondingly lower congestion and packet losses than the best present or proposed networks providing the same number of ports at the same total bisection. These advantage ratios increase with network size. The key new ingredient is the exact equivalence discovered between the problem of maximizing network bisection for large classes of practically interesting Cayley graphs and the problem of maximizing codeword distance for linear error correcting codes. Resulting translation recipe converts existent optimal error correcting codes into optimal throughput networks.Comment: 14 pages, accepted at ANCS 2013 conferenc

On strong Menger-connectivity of star graphs

AbstractMotivated by parallel routing in networks with faults, we study the following graph theoretical problem. Let G be a graph of minimum vertex degree d. We say that G is strongly Menger-connected if for any copy Gf of G with at most d−2 nodes removed, every pair of nodes u and v in Gf are connected by min{degf(u),degf(v)} node-disjoint paths in Gf, where degf(u) and degf(v) are the degrees of the nodes u and v in Gf, respectively. We show that the star graphs, which are a recently proposed attractive alternative to the widely used hypercubes as network models, are strongly Menger-connected. An algorithm of optimal running time is developed that constructs the maximum number of node-disjoint paths of nearly optimal length in star graphs with faults

Optimal Permutation Routing for Low-dimensional Hypercubes

We consider the offline problem of routing a permutation of tokens on the nodes of a d-dimensional hypercube, under a queueless MIMD communication model (under the constraints that each hypercube edge may only communicate one token per communication step, and each node may only be occupied by a single token between communication steps). For a d-dimensional hypercube, it is easy to see that d communication steps are necessary. We develop a theory of “separability ” which enables an analytical proof that d steps suffice for the case d = 3, and facilitates an experimental verification that d steps suffice for d = 4. This result improves the upper bound for the number of communication steps required to route an arbitrary permutation on arbitrarily large hypercubes to 2d − 4. We also find an interesting side-result, that the number of possible communication steps in a d-dimensional hypercube is the same as the number of perfect matchings in a (d + 1)-dimensional hypercube, a combinatorial quantity for which there is no closed-form expression. Finally we present some experimental observations which may lead to a proof of a more general result for arbitrarily large dimension d. 2

I/O embedding and broadcasting in star interconnection networks

The issues of communication between a host or central controller and processors, in large interconnection networks are very important and have been studied in the past by several researchers. There is a plethora of problems that arise when processors are asked to exchange information on parallel computers on which processors are interconnected according to a specific topology. In robust networks, it is desirable at times to send (receive) data/control information to (from) all the processors in minimal time. This type of communication is commonly referred to as broadcasting. To speed up broadcasting in a given network without modifying its topology, certain processors called stations can be specified to act as relay agents. In this thesis, broadcasting issues in a star-based interconnection network are studied. The model adopted assumes all-port communication and wormhole switching mechanism. Initially, the problem treated is one of finding the minimum number of stations required to cover all the nodes in the star graph with i-adjacency. We consider 1-, 2-, and 3-adjacencies and determine the upper bound on the number of stations required to cover the nodes for each case. After deriving the number of stations, two algorithms are designed to broadcast the messages first from the host to stations, and then from stations to remaining nodes; In addition, a Binary-based Algorithm is designed to allow routing in the network by directly working on the binary labels assigned to the star graph. No look-up table is consulted during routing and minimum number of bits are used to represent a node label. At the end, the thesis sheds light on another algorithm for routing using parallel paths in the star network

Deadlock-free routing in a faulty hypercube

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-42).by Eric Lehman.M.S