Towards a more realistic comparative analysis of multicomputer networks

Several studies have examined the relative performance merits of the torus and hypercube taking into account the channel bandwidth constraints imposed by implementation technology. While the torus has been shown to outperform the hypercube under the constant wiring density constraint, the opposite conclusion has been reached when the constant pin‐out constraint is considered. However, these studies have assumed a pure uniform traffic pattern and deterministic routing. The ‘uniform traffic’ assumption is not always justifiable in practice as there are many real‐world parallel applications that exhibit non‐uniform traffic patterns, which can create unbalanced traffic such as hotspots in the network. This paper re‐examines the performance merits of the torus and hypercube in the presence of hotspot traffic. The comparative analysis is based on fully adaptive routing as this has been gaining popularity in recent practical multicomputers. Moreover, it uses a new cost model that takes into account the implementation cost of the network and its routers. The results reveal that for moderate and large system sizes, lower dimensional k‐ary n‐cubes (e.g. 2D torus) always outperform their higher dimensional counterparts even under the pin‐out constraint. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.