Comparisons between mesh and hierarchical ring networks for shared-memory multiprocessors

摘要

Communication performance comparisons, in terms of message latency, between mesh and hierarchical ring interconnection networks for shared-memory multiprocessors are developed. Traffic in the networks is assumed to consist of the short, fixed-length messages needed for remote-memory read/write operations and cache coherency control. Square-mesh networks with bidirectional links and no end-around connections are compared to two- and three- level hierarchical rings. Wormhole routing is used in the meshes, with messages consisting of f flits, with each flit containing b bits. In the ring networks, each ring segment can contain a complete message of f×b bits.