Analysis of Buffer Design for Adaptive Routing in Direct Networks

The performance of a massively parallel computing system is often limited by the speed of its interconnection network. One strategy that has been proposed for improving network e ciency is the use of adaptive routing, in which network state information can be used in determining message paths. The design of an adaptive routing system involves several parameters, and in order to build high speed scalable computing systems, it is important to understand the costs and performance bene ts of these parameters. In this paper, we investigate the e ect of bu er design on communication latency. Four message storage models and their related route selection algorithms are analyzed. A comparison of their performance is presented, and the features of bu er design which are found to significantly impact network e ciency are discussed.