Performance enhancement of multistage interconnection network with nonuniform traffic

Nonuniform traffic in multistage interconnection network (MIN) degrades the performance of MIN. It is more significant when a tree saturation occurs due to hot spot contention. The authors reveal that the number of processors generating hot requests is more influential to the network performance than hot request rate. To effectively reflect this characteristic in the MIN design, they propose to detect early and block the potential hot spot contention in each switch node, while allowing uniform traffic to proceed to the succeeding stages. Thus their design can be efficient for both uniform and nonuniform traffic. The processor-memory bandwidth of their scheme was found to be consistently better than earlier designs for any traffic condition, without a significant implementation overhead.<<ETX>>