Evaluating the Performance of Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithms for Wormhole-Switched Mesh Interconnect Networks

One of the fundamental problems in parallel computing is how to efficiently perform routing in a faulty network each component of which fails with some probability. This paper presents a comparative performance study of ten prominent adaptive fault-tolerant routing algorithms in wormhole-switched 2D mesh interconnect networks. These networks carry a routing scheme suggested by Boppana and Chalasani as an instance of a fault-tolerant method. The suggested scheme is widely used in the literature to achieve high adaptivity and support inter-processor communications in parallel computer systems due to its ability to preserve both communication performance and fault-tolerant demands in these networks. The performance measures studied are the throughput, average message latency and average usage of virtual channels per node. Results obtained through simulation suggest two classes of presented routing schemes as high performance candidate in most faulty networks.