Implementing multidestination worms in switch-based parallel systems: architectural alternatives and their impact

  • Authors:

  • Craig B. Stunkel;Rajeev Sivaram;Dhabaleswar K. Panda

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY;Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH;Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Multidestination message passing has been proposed as an attractive mechanism for efficiently implementing multicast and other collective operations on direct networks. However, applying this mechanism to switch-based parallel systems is non-trivial. In this paper we propose alternative switch architectures with differing buffer organizations to implement multidestination worms on switch-based parallel systems. First, we discuss issues related to such implementation (deadlock-freedom, replication mechanisms, header encoding, and routing). Next, we demonstrate how an existing central-buffer-based switch architecture supporting unicast message passing can be enhanced to accommodate multidestination message passing. Similarly, implementing multidestination worms on an input-buffer-based switch architecture is discussed. Both of these implementations are evaluated against each other as well as against a software-based scheme using the central buffer organization. Simulation experiments under a range of traffic (multiple multicast, bimodal, varying degree of multicast, and message length) and system size are used for evaluation. The study demonstrates the superiority of the central-buffer-based switch architecture. It also indicates that under bimodal traffic the central-buffer-based hardware multicast implementation affects background unicast traffic less adversely compared to a software-based multicast implementation. Thus, multidestination message passing can easily be applied to switch-based parallel systems to deliver good collective communication performance.