DRIL: dynamically reduced message injection limitation mechanism for wormhole networks

Deadlock avoidance and recovery techniques are alternatives to deal with the interconnection network deadlock problem. Both techniques allow fully adaptive routing on some set of resources while providing dedicated resources to escape from deadlock. They mainly differ in the way they supply escape paths and when those paths are used. As the escape paths only provide limited bandwidth to escape from deadlocks, both techniques suffer from severe performance degradation when the network is close to saturation. On the other hand, deadlock recovery is based on the assumption that deadlocks are rare. Several studies show that deadlock are more prone when the network is close to or beyond saturation. In this paper we propose a new mechanism that prevents network saturation by dynamically adjusting message injection limitation into the network. As a consequence, this mechanism will avoid the performance degradation problem that typically occurs in both deadlock avoidance and recovery techniques, making fully adaptive feasible. Also, it will guarantee that the frequency of deadlock is really negligible, allowing the use of simple low-cost recovery strategies.