Efficient barrier synchronization in wormhole-routed mesh networks supporting turn model

Barrier is an important synchronization operation. On scalable parallel computers, it is often implemented as a collective communication. A typical barrier synchronization operation consists of a reduction operation followed by a distribution operation. In this paper, we introduce a systematic way of generating efficient algorithms to perform barrier synchronization in mesh networks. The scheme works with any base routing algorithm that is derivable from the turn model C.J. Glass, L.M. Ni, in: Proc. Intl. Symp. Computer Architecture, pp. 278-297. It extends the turn grouping method proposed by K.P. Fan, C.T. King, Turn grouping for supporting efficient multicast in wormhole mesh networks, in: Proc. 6th Symp. on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computing (Frontiers '96), October 1996 with two new algorithms, Tail_to_Central and Central_to_Tail. These two algorithms schedule the transmissions of synchronization messages in the reduction and distribution phase respectively. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated using four typical turn-model based algorithms. The simulation results show that our approach can take advantage of the adaptivity of the base routing algorithms and outperforms methods proposed previously. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.