A Cost-effective Interconnect Architecture for Interconnection Network

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 x 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.