FBICM: efficient congestion management for high-performance networks using distributed deterministic routing

As the number of components in cluster-based systems increases, costand power consumption also increase. One way to reduce both problems is usingsmaller networks with adequate congestion management mechanisms. Recentsuccessful proposals (RECN) eliminate the negative effects of congestion,the Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking, leaving congestion harmless. RECN relies onsource-based networks architectures, where the entire route is placed at packetheaders before injection. Unfortunately, distributed table-based routing is alsocommon in cluster-based networks, being InfiniBand the most prominent example.We propose a novel congestion management technique for distributed tablebasedrouting. The mechanism relies on additional congestion information locatedat routing tables. With this information HOL blocking is minimized bysmartly using switch queues. Detailed memory organization and the way congestioninformation is updated/propagated is described. Preliminary results indicatethat with modest resource requirements maximum network performance is keptregardless of congestion.