A central problem in building large scale parallel machines is the design of the interconnection network. Interconnection network design is largely constrained by packaging technology. We start with a generic set of packaging restrictions and evaluate different network organizations under a random traffic model. Our results indicate that customizing the network topology to the packaging constraints is useful. Some of the general principles that arise out of this study are: 1) Making the networks denser at the lower levels of the packaging hierarchy has a significant positive impact on global communication performance, 2) It is better to organize a fixed amount of communication bandwidth as a smaller number of high bandwidth channels, 3) For shared memory based communication primitives it is better to make the number of memory modules smaller than the number of processors and 4) Providing the processors with the ability to tolerate latencies (by using multithreading) is very useful in improving performance.
Title
Customizing Interconnection Networks to Suit Packaging Hierarchies
Published
1991-10-31
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
CSD-93-725
Type
Text
Extent
28 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
Usage Statement
Researchers may make free and open use of the UC Berkeley Library’s digitized public domain materials. However, some materials in our online collections may be protected by U.S. copyright law (Title 17, U.S.C.). Use or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use (Title 17, U.S.C. § 107) requires permission from the copyright owners. The use or reproduction of some materials may also be restricted by terms of University of California gift or purchase agreements, privacy and publicity rights, or trademark law. Responsibility for determining rights status and permissibility of any use or reproduction rests exclusively with the researcher. To learn more or make inquiries, please see our permissions policies (https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/permissions-policies).
