A Cost-effective Interconnect Architecture for Interconnection Network

Abstract

The interconnect architecture is essential to the performance of the interconnection network, so it is very significant to design a new cost-effective interconnect architecture. 2D meshes are the most popular interconnect architecture for parallel processing. However, the diameter and average distance of a 2D mesh are large enough to greatly influence performance of the network. This paper presents a novel interconnect architecture called TM, which combines the advantages of both a 2D torus and a 2D mesh. For an n × n network, number of links of a TM is the same as that of a mesh, while the diameter of a TM is close to that of a torus. Besides, the average distance of a TM is at the middle of that of a torus and a mesh. To prevent deadlocks in TMs, a novel deadlock avoidance scheme, called proxy policy, is proposed. Moreover, both the deterministic and fully adaptive routing techniques in TMs are proposed using proxy policy to prevent deadlocks. Sufficient simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the TM network and the new routing schemes.

Keywords:

• Interconnect architecture
• Mesh
• Proxy policy
• Torus-Mesh

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xinyu Wang

Xinyu Wang is a Ph. D student at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Her research interests include networks-on-chip and efficient architecture design. E-mail: [email protected]

Dong Xiang

Dong Xiang is with the School of Software, Tsinghua University as a professor. He got a National Outstanding Young Scientist Award from National Science Foundation of China in 2004. His research interests include design and test of digital systems, including design for testability, testing, fault-tolerant computing, distributed/parallel computing, interconnection networks, and networks-on-chip. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. E-mail: [email protected]

Zhigang Yu

Zhigang Yu is a Ph. D student at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research interests include interconnection networks and efficient routing algorithm design. E-mail: [email protected]