A high performance router architecture for interconnection networks

We propose a new router architecture that supports wormhole switching and circuit switching concurrently. This architecture has been designed to take advantage of temporal communication locality. This can be done by establishing a circuit between nodes that are going to communicate frequently. Messages using those circuits face no contention. By combining circuit switching, pre-established physical circuits and wave pipelining across channels and switches, it is possible to increase network bandwidth considerably, also reducing latency for communications that use pre-established physical circuits. This router architecture also allows to reduce the overhead of the software messaging layer in multicomputers by offering a better hardware support. Preliminary performance evaluation results show a drastic reduction in latency and increment in throughput when messages are long enough, even if circuits are established for a single transmission and locality is not exploited.