On reducing hotspot contention in multistage networks

The authors propose a hardware combining approach for reducing the effects of hotspots on performance in multistage interconnection networks. The new technique tries to increase the rate at which the requests are combined. Instead of considering a single queue for request combination, they consider the two queues leading to the same switching element and the network. This had been found to increase combining at any switching node in the saturation tree. For combining requests in two queues, a modified structure for the switching element is proposed. The proposed technique eliminates tree saturation even in very large networks. It has been shown through simulation that the proposed scheme outperforms most if not all previously suggested schemes