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A novel packet exchanging strategy for preventing HoL-blocking in fat-trees

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Abstract

Fat-tree interconnection network is one of the most popular and widely-used networks in massively parallel processing systems. Its superb characteristics such as deterministic routing, in-order delivery and providing the same performance as adaptive routing methods have made it an attractive interconnection network. However, due to its deterministic routing as well as simultaneously usage of switch links, Head of Line (HoL)-blocking may occur in buffers during high traffic workload. In order to mitigate this problem, in this paper, a novel strategy in switch buffers based on the blocking of the paths is proposed. It has been shown that combining packets with different blocked paths can reduce congestion by packet exchanging. To exchange packets, we used short and medium depth buffers and also considered two exchanging states; consecutive and non-consecutive. This novel strategy provides a trade-off between the performance improvement and reduction of buffers’ depths, while doesn’t change the delivery order of the packets. Simulation results show that in comparison with one buffer in each switch, 22% and 33% average network latency is improved with consecutive and one unit non-consecutive exchanging states respectively and also the depth of buffers in each switch is reduced 43.75% and 37.5% in comparison with multiple buffers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical Engineering Department, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Seyed Mehdi Mohtavipour & Morteza Mollajafari

  2. ICT Department, Imam Hossein University, Tehran, Iran

    Ali Naseri

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  1. Seyed Mehdi Mohtavipour
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Mohtavipour, S.M., Mollajafari, M. & Naseri, A. A novel packet exchanging strategy for preventing HoL-blocking in fat-trees. Cluster Comput 23, 461–482 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-019-02940-2

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