Steady/Unsteady Communication Performance in Large-Scale Regular Networks

State-of-the-art supercomputers consist of a huge number of computing nodes that are connected by an interconnection network. Although such large-scale systems have regular organizations, scaling study on the network is not sufficient so far. This paper focuses on two-dimensional torus network with two typical routing algorithms, i.e., dimension-order and Duato´s protocol, and presents steady and unsteady performance results. We introduce quantitative evaluation methodology and discuss scaling issues quantitatively. Evaluation results by our parallelized simulator reveal that any size of networks have similar performance features when the performance metrics are properly normalized. This paper gives a scaling view of the interconnection network for future huge-scale systems.