Deadlock-Free Multicast Wormhole Routing in 2-D Mesh Multicomputers

  • Authors:
  • X. Lin;P. K. McKinley;L. M. Ni

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

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

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Abstract

Multicast communication services, in which the same message is delivered from a sourcenode to an arbitrary number of destination nodes, are being provided in new-generationmulticomputers. Broadcast is a special case of multicast in which a message is deliveredto all nodes in the network. The nCUBE-2, a wormhole-routed hypercube multicomputer,provides hardware support for broadcast and a restricted form of multicast in which thedestinations form a subcube. However, the broadcast routing algorithm adopted in thenCUBE-2 is not deadlock-free. In this paper, four multicast wormhole routing strategiesfor 2-D mesh multicomputers are proposed and studied. All of the algorithms are shown to be deadlock-free. These are the first deadlock-free multicast wormhole routing algorithms ever proposed. A simulation study has been conducted that compares the performance of these multicast algorithms under dynamic network traffic conditions in a 2-D mesh. The results indicate that a dual-path routing algorithm offers performance advantages over tree-based, multipath, and fixed-path algorithms.