Multicast Communication for Cut-Through Switching Networks

Cut-through switching networks have become a popular interconnection architecture for constructing large-scale distributed-memory multiprocessors and high-speed workstation clusters. Efficient communication among nodes is critical to the performance of cut-through switching network based systems. Multicast communication is being increasingly demanded in multimedia commercial applications and scientific parallel applications. System supported multicast services can potentially offer improved performance, increased functionality, and simplified programming.

This research addresses how to efficiently implement multicast services in cut-through switching networks, in the absence of hardware multicast support at intermediate switches. Minimum-time multicast algorithms are presented for direct networks including general n-dimensional meshes and hypercubes and indirect networks including multistage networks supporting turnaround routing. The results of implementations on a 64-node IBM SP-1 show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the application-level broadcast primitives provided by currently existing collective communication libraries including the public domain MPI.

Recent Papers

  • ``Unicast-Based Multicast Communication in Wormhole-Routed Networks'', (P. K. McKinley, H. Xu, A. H. Esfahanian, and L. M. Ni), IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems , vol. 5, no. 12, pp. 1252-1265, Dec., 1994.

  • ``Optimal Software Multicast in Wormhole-Routed Multistage Networks'', (H. Xu, Y. D. Gui, and L. M. Ni), Proceedings of Supercomputing'94 , pp. 703--712, Nov., 1994.

  • ``A Scalable Multicast Service in 2D Mesh Networks'', (H. Xu, P. K. McKinley, and L. M. Ni), Frontiers'92: The 4th Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation , pp.156--163, Oct. 1992.