Performance issues of deterministic and adaptive ghost-packet routers

The performance of many parallel applications takes great benefits from the improvements made on multicomputer interconnection networks. The routers on which these networks are based should be carefully designed in order to offer good performance, while keeping their implementations as simple and cost-effective as possible. In this paper we present a new starvation and deadlock free routing algorithm: the ghost-packet algorithm. Detailed evaluation of both deterministic and adaptive versions of the algorithm show that their performance is better than the one of other state-of-the-art routing algorithms, mainly because of the hardware cost reduction achieved in router design.