Two-phase Multicast in Wormhole-Switched Bidirectional Multistage Banyan Networks

A multistage interconnection network is a suitable class of interconnection architecture for constructing large-scale multicomputers. Broadcast and multicast communication are fundamental in supporting collective communication operations such as reduction and barrier synchronization. In this paper, we propose a new multicast technique in wormhole-switched bidirectional multistage banyan networks for constructing large-scale multicomputers. To efficiently support broadcast and multicast with simple additional hardware without deadlock, we propose a two-phase multicast algorithm which takes only two transmissions to perform a broadcast and a multicast to an arbitrary number of desired destinations. We encode a header as a cube and adopt the most upper input link first scheme with periodic priority rotation as arbitration mechanism on contented output links. We coalesce the desired destination addresses into multiple number of cubes. And then, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm by simulation. The proposed two-phase multicast algorithm makes a significant improvement in terms of latency. It is noticeable that the two-phase algorithm keeps broadcast latency as efficient as the multicast latency of fanout 2 where m is the minimum integer satisfying 2 pN (N is a network size).