A hardware multicast routing algorithm for two-dimensional meshes

Multicast communication is a significant operation an multicomputer systems and can be used to support several other collective communication operations. Hardware implementation is a viable solution to develop a low latency multicast algorithm. In this paper, we present a new multicast routing algorithm for two-dimensional meshes. The algorithm uses wormhole routing mechanism and can send messages to any number of destinations within two start-up communication phases; hence the name, two-phase multicast (TPM) algorithm. The algorithm uses the base routing scheme used for unicast communication, thus minimizing the additional hardware support. The algorithm allows some intermediate nodes that are not in the destination set to perform multicast functions. This feature allows flexibility in multicast path selection and therefore improves the performance. A simulation study has been conducted to investigate the performance of the purposed TPM algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed TPM algorithm performs significantly better for both contention-free and mixed-traffic conditions, when compared with the previously proposed multicast algorithms.