Enforcing in-order packet delivery in system area networks with adaptive routing

Adaptive routing, which dynamically selects the route of a packet, has been widely studied for interconnection networks in massively parallel computers and system area networks. Although adaptive routing has the advantage of providing high bandwidth, it may deliver packets out-of-order, which some message passing libraries don’t accept. In this paper, we propose two mechanisms called 1) FIFO transmission and 2) couple limitation to guarantee in-order packet delivery in adaptive routing. Both of them limit packet injection at source hosts. The FIFO transmission completely avoids packet sorting at destination hosts, while the couple limitation uses few additional buffers to sort packets at destination hosts. Evaluation results show that the FIFO transmission and the couple limitation achieve a similar throughput to that of a method equipped with huge (infinite) buffers enough to store all outof-order packets at destination hosts under both synthetic traffic and NAS Parallel Benchmarks.