Improving Valiant Routing for Slim Fly Networks

Valiant routing, the use of a random intermediate node to distribute network traffic, has been proposed for a number of recent HPC network topologies. It is also commonly used as a building block for adaptive routing algorithms, which use shortest path routes when possible, but revert to Valiant routing when necessary to avoid hot spots. We show that the version of Valiant routing proposed for the Slim fly topology can cause messages to follow loops, using an edge in both directions before returning to edges of the original shortest path. Removing these loops in the UGAL-L adaptive routing algorithm is shown to provide slight improvements in average latency and also allow the network to carry up to 12% more traffic before saturation.