A Cost Efficient Multicast Nonblocking Interconnection Network

Interconnection networks lie at the heart of parallel processing architectures for big data, because the way that machines, processors or memory modules connected to each other has a significant effect on the scalability, reliability, cost and performance. For example, an interconnection network with multicast capability can distribute data from a single source to all the destinations in a one-shot manner, eliminating unnecessary duplications and minimizing communication delays. Also, a nonblocking interconnection network delivers guaranteed path availability to any connection requests, without interference to existing connections. However, implementing multicast nonblocking networks imposes great challenges to designers because both of them demand high hardware cost. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel type of interconnection network, named Multicast Capable Low-cost Network (MCL), which is both nonblocking for multicast traffic and cost efficient. We first design the topologies and routing algorithms for MCL, and then prove its multicast nonblocking properties. Most importantly, we show that MCL achieves outstanding cost efficiency. To be specific, our explicitly constructed MCL has the cost of O(N-5/4). This hardware cost achieves a new record low, comparing to previous solutions which deliver the same performance.