Adaptive wormhole routing in k-ary n-cubes

Distributed memory multiprocessor (DMMP) systems have gained much attention because their performance can be easily scaled up by increasing the number of processor-memory modules. The k-ary n-cube is the most popular interconnection network topology currently used in DMMPs. Wormhole routing is one of the most promising switching technology and has been used in many new generation multicomputers. Wormhole routing makes the communication latency insensitive to the network diameter and reduces the size of the channel buffer of each router. The concept of virtual channels and virtual networks are widely invented for deadlock-free design. A fully adaptive wormhole routing method for k-ary n-cubes has been proposed by Linder in 1991 [10]. Unfortunately, the need of 2(n-1) virtual networks makes it unreasonable. In this paper, we propose a virtual network system to support an adaptive, minimal and deadlock free routing in k-ary n-cubes. It uses only four virtual networks but can get a higher degree of adaptability and higher traffic capacity. Simulation results are presented to verify the performance.