Alleviating Consumption Channel Bottleneck in Wormhole-Routed k-ary n-cube Systems

Abstract

This paper identifies performance degradation in wormhole routed k-ary n-cube networks due to limited number of router-to-processor consumption channels at each node. Many recent research in wormhole routing have advocated the advantages of adaptive routing and virtual channel flow control schemes to deliver better network performance. However, most of these results are based on infinite message consumption capacity leading to unrealistic design guidelines. This paper indicates that the advantages associated with these schemes can not be realized with limited consumption capacity. To alleviate such performance bottleneck, a new solution using multiple consumption channels is proposed. It is shown that wormhole networks with higher routing adaptivity, dimensionality, degree of hot-spot traffic, and number of virtual networks have to take advantage of multiple consumption channels to deliver better performance. The interplay between system topology, routing algorithm, number of virtual c..