Fast-Response Dynamic Routing Balancing for High-Speed Interconnection Networks

Communication requirements in High Performance Computing systems demand the use of high-speed Interconnection Networks to connect processing nodes. However, when communication load is unfairly distributed across the network resources, message congestion appears. Congestion spreading increases latency and reduces network throughput causing important performance degradation. The Fast-Response Dynamic Routing Balancing (FR-DRB) is a method developed to perform a uniform balancing of communication load over the interconnection network. FR-DRB distributes the message traffic based on a gradual and load-controlled path expansion. The method monitors network message latency and makes decisions about the number of alternative paths to be used between each source-destination pair for message delivery. FR-DRB performance has been compared with other routing policies under a representative set of traffic patterns which are commonly created by parallel scientific applications. Experiments results show an important improvement in latency and throughput.