HPAM 舑 a deadlock-free multicast algorithm for irregular topologies

Recently, networks of workstations (NOWs) with underling switch-based networks have been considered as a cost-effective alternative to massively parallel processors. This paper presents a new deadlock-free tree-based multicast algorithm, HPAM, for irregular networks. The HPAM algorithm selects a node represents the horizontal path ancestor (
hpa
) of all destinations in the multicast. The
hpa
is calculated first at the source node and attached to the packet during the transmission. HPAM consists of two phases, the first has a single-head worm and the second has a multi-head worm. The multicast message is first routed to the
hpa
and after the message has arrived at the
hpa
, the head of the worm will need to split into a multi-head worm. The heads of the multi-head worms may split repeatedly in order to reach all of the destinations. A mathematical model is introduced to define the message forwarding of the HPAM algorithm. Simulation studies on different irregular networks are introduced to demonstrate that the HPAM algorithm outperformed a previous algorithm.