Deterministic Routing with HoL-Blocking-Awareness for Direct Topologies
Roberto Peñaranda, Crispín Gómez, María E. Gómez, Pedro López, José F. Duato · Procedia Computer Science · 2013
Routing is a key design factor to obtain the maximum performance out of interconnection networks. Depending on the number of routing options that packets may use, routing algorithms are classified into two categories. If the packet can only use a single predetermined path, routing is deterministic, whereas if several paths are available, it is adaptive. It is well-known that adaptive routing usually outperforms deterministic routing. However, adaptive routers are more complex and introduces out-of-order delivery of packets. In this paper, we take up the challenge of developing a deterministic routing algorithm for direct topologies that can obtain a similar performance than adaptive routing, while providing the inherent advantages of deterministic routing such as in-order delivery of packets and implementation simplicity. The proposed deterministic routing algorithm is aware of the HoL-blocking effect, and it is designed to reduce it, which, as known, it is a key contributor to degrade interconnection network performance.