Multidestination message passing mechanism conforming to base wormhole routing scheme

Abstract

A new concept of multidestination wormhole mechanism is proposed which allows a message to be propagated along any valid path in a wormhole network conforming to the underlying base routing scheme (ecube, planar, turn, or fully adaptive). Two schemes are developed and evaluated to perform fast multicasting and broadcasting in 2D/3D meshes/tori using this new mechanism. Not only do these schemes demonstrate superiority over Umesh [10] and Hamiltonian Path [9] schemes, they indicate an interesting result that the cost of multicast can be reduced or kept near-constant as the degree of multicast increases. Variations of the proposed schemes to take advantage of routing-adaptivity are also presented. These results are the first ones in the wormhole-routing literature to propose multicasting schemes with such reduced overhead and provision for taking advantage of adaptivity. It lays a new foundation in building high-performance wormhole architecture for supporting fast collective communication operations.

This research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant #MIP-9309627.