Unicast-Based Multicast Communication in Wormhole-Routed Networks

  • Authors:
  • Philip K. McKinley;Hong Xu;Lionel M. Ni;Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

Multicast communication, in which the same message is delivered from a source node toan arbitrary number of destination nodes, is being increasingly demanded in parallelcomputing. System supported multicast services can potentially offer improvedperformance, increased functionality, and simplified programming, and may in turn be used to support various higher-level operations for data movement and global process control. This paper presents efficient algorithms to implement multicast communication in wormhole-routed direct networks, in the absence of hardware multicast support, byexploiting the properties of the switching technology. Minimum-time multicast algorithms are presented for n-dimensional meshes and hypercubes that use deterministic,dimension-ordered routing of unicast messages. Both algorithms can deliver a multicastmessage to m-1 destinations in [log/sub 2/ m] message passing steps, while avoidingcontention among the constituent unicast messages. Performance results ofimplementations on a 64-node nCUBE-2 hypercube and a 168-node Symult 2010 2-Dmesh are given.