Lessen Interflow Interference Using Virtual Channels Partitioning

Interconnection networks are a significant consideration for high-performance computing and the datacenter. However, interflow interference seriously impacts the communication performance and even causes disastrous congestion. The paper reports a virtual channel (VC)-sharing scheme that is aimed to separate VCs into many groups, and assign them to data flows based on the destination address. The technique can effectively isolate various traffics into separate VCs groups such that heavy loads have a lesser influence on the other normal traffics. As a consequence, we achieve a slimming congestion tree. In the proposal, the routing algorithm is a two-stage selection that includes the port selection and the VC group selection, respectively. Each of them has an independently selecting algorithm so that routing algorithm is a combined tactic by Cartesian product. The experiment represents that our scheme has excellent performance on adversarial traffics. Using our scheme, the growth curve is linear and slow after crossing the saturation point. For benign traffic patterns, our scheme does not effect any oblivious change on the communication performance when the system receives a lower injection rate.