The W-Network: A low-cost fault-tolerant multistage interconnection network for fine-grain multiprocessing
✍ Scribed by Theobald, Kevin B.
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 930 KB
- Volume
- 8
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1040-3108
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Large-scale multiprocessors require an efficient interconnection network to achieve good performance. This network, like the rest of the system, should befuulf-tolcrunt (able to continue operating even when there are hardware failures). This paper presents the W-Network, a lowcost fault-tolerant MIN which is well-suited to a large multiprocessor running fine-grain parallel programs. It tolerates all single faults without any increases in latency or decreases in bandwidth following a fault, because it behaves just like the fault-free network even when there is a single fault. It requires only one extra port per chip, which makes it practical for a VLSI implementation. In addition, extra ports can be added for replacing faulty processors with spares.
Interconnection networks for fine-grain parallelism
This paper is primarily concerned with networks for large-scale parallel machines exploiting fine-grain parallelism, such as dataflow architectures[ 11 or the EARTH multithreaded project [2]. Fine-grain parallelism is important to such machines, because in many applications, large grain sizes constrain parallelism [3]. As more processors are added to parallel machines, the trend has been for computation grain sizes to decrease [4]. If grain sizes are small, then the messages passed between them will be short and frequent, on average.