A Comparative Study of Distributed Resource Sharing on Multiprocessors

In this paper we have studied the interconnection of resources to multiprocessors and the distributed scheduling of these resources. For a given interconnection network, the resource-mapping problem entails the search of one of the free resources which can be connected to each requesting processor. To prevent the bottleneck of sequential scheduling, a request without any destination address is given to the network, and the network is responsible for finding the necessary resource and connecting it to the processor. The addressing mechanism is thus distributed in the network. Three different classes of networks have been investigated: namely, single shared bus, multiple shared buses, and multistage dynamic networks. In each case, the scheduling algorithm is described, and the tradeoffs of different network configurations are studied. The resource-sharing networks are a generalization of conventional interconnection networks with routing tags in which all the resources are of different types.