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Multidestination communications are a highly necessary capability for many coherence protocols in order to minimize on-chip hit latency. Although CMPs share this necessity, up to now few suitable proposals have been developed. The combination of resource scarcity and the common idea that multicast support requires a substantial amount of extra resources is responsible for this situation. In this work, we propose a new approach suitable for on-chip networks capable of managing multidestination traffic via hardware in an efficient way with negligible complexity. We introduce a novel multicast routing mechanism, able to circumvent many of the limitations of conventional multicast schemes. Adaptive-tree multicasting is able to maintain correctness for multiflit multicast messages without routing restrictions, while also coupling correctness and performance in a natural way. Replication restrictions not only guarantee the presence of enough resources to avoid deadlock, but also dynamically adapt tree shape to network conditions, routing multicast messages through noncongested paths. The performance results, using a state-of-the-art full system simulation framework, show that it improves the average full system performance of a CMP by 20 percent and network ED2P by 15 percent, when compared to a state-of-the-art router with conventional multicast support and similar implementation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complete mechanism for tolerating multiple failures in parallel computer systems, denoted as Immunet, is described in this paper. Immunet can be applied to arbitrary topologies, either regular or irregular, exhibiting in both cases graceful performance degradation. Provided that the network remains connected, Immunet is able to deal with any number of failures regardless of their spatial and temporal distributions. Our mechanism operates on the basis of a dynamic network reconfiguration in response to failures. The network reconfiguration only employs local information recorded at the router nodes, which leads to a highly scalable system. In addition, its low cost and overhead permit a practicable hardware implementation. Finally, as Immunet does not require in-flight traffic to be discarded, the parallel applications running in the system can transparently circumvent network failures. Only packets stored in or traveling through a broken component need to be recovered by higher system levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an innovative router design, called Rotary Router, which successfully addresses CMP cost/performance constraints. The router structure is based on two independent rings, which force packets to circulate either clockwise or counterclockwise, traveling through every port of the router. These two rings constitute a completely decentralized arbitration scheme that enables a simple, but efficient way to connect every input port to every output port. The proposed router is able to avoid network deadlock, livelock, and starvation without requiring data-path modifications. The organization of the router permits the inclusion of throughput enhancement techniques without significantly penalizing the implementation cost. In particular, the router performs adaptive routing, eliminates HOL blocking, and carries out implicit congestion control using simple arbitration and buffering strategies. Additionally, the proposal is capable of avoiding end-to-end deadlock at coherence protocol level with no physical or virtual resource replication, while guaranteeing in-order packet delivery. This facilitates router management and improves storage utilization. Using a comprehensive evaluation framework that includes full-system simulation and hardware description, the proposal is compared with two representative router counterparts. The results obtained demonstrate the Rotary Router's substantial performance and efficiency advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]