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Transit ring: bubble flow control for eliminating inter-ring communication congestion

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Abstract

Bubble flow control is a flow control mechanism commonly used in torus network. Bubble flow control ensures the orderly flow of packets in the ring by efficiently allocating intra-ring buffer resources and solves the intra-ring deadlock problem. However, inter-ring communication with bubble flow control is subject to strict limitations. When packets are communicated across the rings, starvation may occur, resulting in prolonged blocking within the ring. Inefficient inter-ring communication not only generates Head-of-Line blocking, but also affects the whole intra-ring communication through the backpressure mechanism. We propose a Transit Ring design that establishes an alternate ring link in the torus network by reusing free buffers in the router. By evacuating packets blocking inter-ring communication into the Transit Ring, starvation, as well as Head-of-Line blocking, in the network is eliminated. Compared to state-of-the-art bubble flow control, our proposed design improves saturation throughput by an average of 15.9% in a 4\(\times\)4 torus network and 17.06% in an 8\(\times\)8 torus network.

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Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) research Projects (Grant Number 61874157).

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  1. School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China

    Yiming Ouyang, Chenglong Sun, Ruifeng Li, Qi Wang & Jianhua Li

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  1. Yiming Ouyang
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Correspondence to Chenglong Sun.

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Ouyang, Y., Sun, C., Li, R. et al. Transit ring: bubble flow control for eliminating inter-ring communication congestion. J Supercomput 79, 1161–1181 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04712-z

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