Immunet: Dependable Routing for Interconnection Networks with Arbitrary Topology.

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]