Region Broadcasting in k-ary m-way Networks

k-ary m-way networks are especially suitable for broadcasting because of the shared nature of m-way channels. A flit placed on an m-way channel can be accepted concurrently by adjacent routers and node interfaces during a given clock cycle. This paper discusses two modified Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) broadcast algorithms that are designed to work efficiently in k-ary mway networks. The algorithms are the MST-safe and MSTreplica. The two tree-based algorithms are deadlock free and can be safely mixed with dimension-order routing for unicast messages. The performance of k-ary m-way mesh and hypercube networks is evaluated using the MST-Safe and MST-Replica algorithms and compared with existing unicast-based broadcast algorithms, which are Recursive Doubling and MST-unicast. The results clearly favor the MST-safe and MST-replica over the unicast-based broadcast algorithms.