Adaptive virtual cut-through as a viable routing method

Abstract

Adaptive virtual cut-through is considered as a viable alternative to wormhole switching for fast and hardware-efficient interprocessor communication in multicomputers. Computer simulations are used to show that our implementation of a minimal-path fully-adaptive virtual cut-through algorithm outperforms both deterministic and adaptive wormhole switching methods under both uniform random message distributions and clustered distributions such as the matrix transpose. A hardware-efficient implementation of adaptive virtual cut-through has been implemented using a semi-custom-designed router chip that requires only 2.3% mon area than a comparable deterministic wormhole router chip. A network interface controller chip, which is crucial to our adaptive virtual cut-through method, has also been designed and is under fabrication. (C) 1998 Academic Press, Inc.