Scalable crossbar network: a non-blocking interconnection network for large-scale systems

Abstract

Interconnection networks (INs) are used in wide applications of multiprocessor systems in order to set up connections between various nodes such as processors and memory modules. However, there is a fundamental problem in INs that has always been considered as one of the most challenging issues in this area. Blocking problem in these networks degrades network performance and consequently the performance of the whole system. In the meantime, the main option for dealing with this problem is the use of non-blocking crossbar networks. However, there are engineering and scaling difficulties when using these networks in large-scale systems. The number of pins on a VLSI chip cannot exceed a few hundreds, which restricts the size of the largest crossbar that should be integrated into a single VLSI chip. Using the idea of multistage implementation of crossbar network can resolve the problem. However, the next problem that arises with this idea is high hardware cost. Therefore, in this paper, a new implementation of crossbar network named scalable crossbar network (SCN) that is a non-blocking network is presented to cope with the aforementioned scaling problems. In addition, performance analysis results show that SCN outperforms multistage crossbar networks and multistage interconnection networks in terms of terminal reliability, mean time to failure, and system failure rate.

Formulating broadcast reliability equations on multilayer multistage interconnection networks

“…However, these networks are often considered as a basic structure for implementing reliability improvement methods. Therefore, these networks have been considered in many of the previous works [8,[38][39][40][41][42].…”

“…Reliability analysis on extra-stage MINs One approach to improve the reliability of the MINs is adding stages in these networks. These extra-stage MINs can provide more paths between each source-destination pair, resulting high reliability in comparison to Banyan-type MINs [8,[37][38][39][40][41]. According to the reported work, similar to Banyan-type MINs, there is a gap in the reliability analyses on the extrastage MINs; the pervious works are limited to networks made of 2 × 2 switching elements.…”

“…Reliability is one of the most important performance measures for different types of networks, such as electrical and gas networks [21][22][23], wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) [24][25][26], wireless mesh networks [27][28][29][30], wireless sensor networks [31][32][33], sensors based on nanowire networks [34], social networks [35], stochastic-flow manufacturing networks (SMNs) [36], and interconnection networks [8][9][10][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. Generally, a network can be defined as a collection of nodes and links (which are known as vertices and edges in graph theory, respectively) in which some particular nodes are called terminals.…”

“…Regarding the above arguments, in selecting an appropriate MLMIN, reliability assessment is one of the main factors [37,38]. On the other hand, another factor that should be considered in MLMINs is multicast capability.…”

“…On the other hand, according to the previous research works [38,39], reliability analyses have been done on some particular MLMINs and hence, are not complete enough and general to extend on other MLMIN topologies (this issue will be discussed in detail in Sect. 2).…”