A Novel Tradeoff Analysis between Traffic Congestion and Packing Density of Interconnection Networks for Massively Parallel Computers

Abstract

From disaster prevention to mitigation, drug analysis to drug design, agriculture to food security, IoT to AI, and big data analysis to knowledge or sentiment mining, a high computation power is a prime necessity at present. As such, massively parallel computer (MPC) systems comprising a large number of nodes are gaining popularity. To interconnect these huge numbers of nodes efficiently, hierarchical interconnection networks are an attractive and feasible option. A Tori-connected flattened butterfly network (TFBN) has been proposed by the authors in a prior work for future generation MPC systems. In the previous study, the static network performance and static cost-effectiveness were evaluated. In this research, a novel trade-off factor named message traffic congestion vs. packing density trade-off factor has been proposed, which characterizes the message congestion in the network and its packing density. The factor is used to statically assess the suitability of the implementation of an interconnection network. The message traffic density, packing density, and new factor have been evaluated for the proposed network and similar competitive networks such as TTN, TESH, 2D-Mesh, 3D-Mesh, 2D-Torus, and 3D-Torus. It has been found that the performance of the TFBN is superior to the other networks.