Robust and Efficient Custom Routing for Interconnection Networks with Distributed Shortcuts

Abstract

We aim at creating a robust and efficient custom routing mechanism for Distributed Shortcut Networks (Nguyen et al., 2013), which address new challenging issues posed by recently advanced studies in the areas of massively parallel computing and large-scale data centers. We follow the design principles of Distributed Shortcut Networks (DSN), which construct non-random topologies with the creation of long-range shortcuts inspired by observations in small-world networks. However, we focus on designing a powerful custom routing mechanism which smartly exploits some precious properties of the topology. As a result, our new DSN-a network with a carefully refined routing logic performs significantly better than the basic DSN in term of communication latency while provides strengths in fault-tolerance as well as load-balance. These help the network become robust against link failures or burst of traffic demand while topology-agnostic deadlock-free routing (e.g. the famous up*/down* algorithm) suffers a lot.