Universal Wormhole Routing
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This is a revised version of the conference paper that can be found at http://ecommons.luc.edu/cs_facpubs/113 (along with presentation slides).
Abstract
In this paper, we examine the wormhole routing problem in terms of the “congestion” c and “dilation” d for a set of packet paths. We show, with mild restrictions, that there is a simple randomized algorithm for routing any set of P packets in O(cdη+cLηlogP) time with high probability, where L is the number of flits in a packet, and η=min{d,L}; only a constant number of flits are stored in each queue at any time. Using this result, we show that a fat-tree network of area Θ(A) can simulate wormhole routing on any network of comparable area with O(log^3 A) slowdown, when all worms have the same length. Variable-length worms are also considered. We run some simulations on the fat-tree which show that not only does wormhole routing tend to perform better than the more heavily studied store-and-forward routing in this context, but that performance superior to our provable bound is attainable in practice.
