A hardware supported multicast scheme based on XY routing for 2-D mesh InfiniBand networks

Abstract

The multicast operation is a useful operation in parallel applications. It is therefore important to ensure that for a given architecture, the parallel application runs efficiently. With the hardware-supported multicast of the InfiniBand Architecture (IBA), we propose a multicast scheme for m × n mesh InfiniBand networks based on XY routing. The basic concept of the proposed multicast scheme is to find the union sets of the output ports of switches, which are in the paths between the source node and each destination node in a multicast group. Furthermore, in the proposed scheme, we consider the usage of virtual lanes and evaluate their performance. We implement the proposed multicast scheme on a 2-D mesh InfiniBand network simulator. Several multicast configurations consisting of different message size, different traffic workload and different number of virtual lanes are simulated. The simulation results show that the proposed multicast scheme outperforms its corresponding unicast scheme for all simulation cases. The larger the message size, the larger the number of multicast source nodes, and the larger the size of the multicast group, the better the speedup that can be expected from the proposed multicast scheme. The usage of virtual lanes is also shown to improve the speed of the multicast operations.