A virtual bus for dynamic parallel processing

The paper proposes an efficient interconnection network architecture called virtual bus that can sustain nonuniform traffic by dynamically allowing time sharing of network bandwidth among processing nodes. The bandwidth sharing is controlled by a fast variable priority arbitration scheme with a round-robin scheduling policy. The virtual bus architecture allows efficient implementation; with current technology, the virtual bus can achieve giga packets and tera bits per second throughputs in less than 5% of the total cost of an eight thousand port system