Cost-Performance Bounds for Multimicrocomputer Networks

Several interconnection structures for a distributed multimicrocomputer message-passing system are compared on the basis of cost and performance. Among the structures analyzed are buses, double rings, D-dimensional toroids, trees, cube-connected cycles, and chordal rings. Network cost is defined in terms of the number of network nodes and the unit cost of communication links and their associated connections. Simple asymptotic performance bounds are derived based on the bottleneck analysis of a queueing network. In contrast to the usual assumption of uniform message routing, the technique permits the introduction of a reference locality notion to the message routing behavior of network nodes. Finally, the cost, performance, and performance/cost functions are examined as the number of network nodes becomes very large.