PCBN: a high-performance partitionable circular bus network for distributed systems

The authors present a dynamically partitionable circular bus network (PCBN) and efficient algorithms for maximizing its utilization. In their approach, a distributed network is transformed into a graph, in which a vertex represents a communication request and an edge denotes the conflict between a pair of communication requests. A graph traversal algorithm is applied to the graph to identify some maximal independent sets of vertices. The communication requests corresponding to the vertices of a maximum independent set call proceed in parallel. By computing the expected size of the maximal independent sets of a graph, the improvement ratio of the network can be obtained. The network control and synchronization techniques of PCBN are described in detail. The idling problem in the execution of nonconflicting requests is also discussed