Compressionless Routing: A Framework for Adaptive and Fault-Tolerant Routing

  • Authors:
  • Jae H. Kim;Ziqiang Liu;Andrew A. Chien

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana;Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana;Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Compressionless Routing (CR) is a new adaptive routing framework which provides a unified framework for efficient deadlock-free adaptive routing and fault-tolerance. CR exploits the tight-coupling between wormhole routers for flow control to detect and recover from potential deadlock situations. Fault-tolerant Compressionless Routing (FCR) extends CR to support end-to-end fault-tolerant delivery. Detailed routing algorithms, implementation complexity, and performance simulation results for CR and FCR are presented. These results show that the hardware for CR and FCR networks is modest. Further, CR and FCR networks can achieve superior performance to alternatives such as dimension-order routing.Compressionless Routing has several key advantages: deadlock-free adaptive routing in toroidal networks with no virtual channels, simple router designs, order-preserving message transmission, applicability to a wide variety of network topologies, and elimination of the need for buffer allocation messages. Fault-tolerant Compressionless Routing has several additional advantages: data integrity in the presence of transient faults (nonstop fault-tolerance), permanent faults tolerance, and elimination of the need for software buffering and retry for reliability. The advantages of CR and FCR not only simplify hardware support for adaptive routing and fault-tolerance, they also can simplify software communication layers.