Impact of adaptivity on the behavior of networks of workstations under bursty traffic

Networks of workstations (NOWs) are becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to parallel computers. Typically, these networks present irregular topologies, providing the wiring flexibility, scalability, and incremental expansion capability required in this environment. Similar to the evolution of parallel computers, NOWs are also evolving from distributed memory to shared memory. However distances between processors are longer in NOWs, leading to higher message latency and lower network bandwidth. Therefore, one can expect the network to be a bottleneck when executing some parallel applications on a NOW supporting a shared-memory programming paradigm. The authors analyze whether the interconnection network in a NOW is able to efficiently handle the traffic generated in a DSM with the same number of processors. They evaluate the behavior of a NOW using application traces captured during the execution of several SPLASH2 applications on a DSM simulator. They show through simulation that the adaptive routing algorithm previously proposed by them almost eliminates network saturation due to its ability to support a higher sustained throughput. Therefore, adaptive routing becomes a key design issue to achieve similar performance in NOWs and tightly-coupled DSMs.