The performance improvement of wormhole router for multicomputer systems

Wormhole routing has been introduced into message-passing interconnection networks to reduce communication latency. However, the networks may reach saturation rapidly because of the small number of flit buffers. In this paper, a simulator is developed to investigate approaches to raise the performance of wormhole routers. The results suggest that 4 to 8 flit buffers, instead of one flit buffer, are more suitable for each channel. In addition, it shows that by adaptive routing, not only communication latency, but also throughput is better than deterministic routing. Finally, short packet length is suggested to reduce the blocking time, and it could lessen the deviation of communication latency.<>