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The impact of packetization in wormhole-routed networks

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PARLE '93 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe (PARLE 1993)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 694))

Abstract

Packetization is used in a variety of commercial multicomputers because of its potential performance advantages: higher throughput and a better distribution of message latencies. However, packetization has two significant drawbacks, 1) fragmentation and reassembly overhead and 2) increased traffic volume for routing and sequencing information. In this paper, we examine the performance benefits of packetization in existing dimension-order routed networks and in likely future router designs including adaptive routing and virtual lanes.

Our studies show that packetization has a mixed effect on performance in dimension-order routers. Packetizing uniform-sized traffic reduces network throughput dramatically. However, if the traffic is a bimodal distribution of sizes, packetization reduces the variance of latencies for short messages, and increases the network's overall throughput. On the other hand, packetization has no significant impact on the performance of advanced networks with adaptive routing and virtual lanes. Advanced routers without packetization give nearly identical performance to the corresponding packetizing networks under uniform-sized or bimodal traffic. Packetization may be unnecessary in such networks.

The research described in this paper was supported in part by NSF grants CCR-9209336 and MIP-92-23732, ONR grant N00014-92-J-1961, and NASA grant NAG 1-613. Additional support has been provided by a generous special-purpose grant from the AT&T Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1304 W. Springfield Avenue, 61801, Urbana, IL

    Jae H. Kim & Andrew A. Chien

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  1. Jae H. Kim
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  2. Andrew A. Chien
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Arndt Bode Mike Reeve Gottfried Wolf

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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kim, J.H., Chien, A.A. (1993). The impact of packetization in wormhole-routed networks. In: Bode, A., Reeve, M., Wolf, G. (eds) PARLE '93 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe. PARLE 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 694. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56891-3_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56891-3_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-56891-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47779-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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