Adaptive Routing Strategies for Modern High Performance Networks

Today's scalable high-performance applications heavily depend on the bandwidth characteristics of their communication patterns. Contemporary multi-stage interconnection networks suffer from network contention which might decrease application performance. Our experiments show that the effective bisection bandwidth of a non-blocking 512-node Clos network is as low as 38% if the network is routed statically.In this paper, we propose and analyze different adaptive routing schemes for those networks. We chose Myrinet/MX to implement our proposed routing schemes. Our best adaptive routing scheme is able to increase the effective bisection bandwidth to 77% for 512 nodes and 100% for smaller node counts. Thus, we show that our proposed adaptive routing schemes are able to improve network throughput significantly.