LAPSES: A recipe for high performance adaptive router design

Earlier research has shown that adaptive routing can help in improving network performance. However it has not received adequate attention in commercial routers mainly due to the additional hardware complexity and the perceived cost and performance degradation that may result from this complexity: These concerns can be mitigated if one can design a cost-effective router that can support adaptive routing. This paper proposes a three step recipe - Look-Ahead routing, intelligent Path Selection, and an Economic Storage implementation, called the LAPSES approach - for cost-effective high performance pipelined adaptive router design. The first step, look-ahead routing, reduces a pipeline stage in the router by making table lookup and arbitration concurrent. Next, three new traffic-sensitive path selection heuristics (LRU, LFU and MAX-CREDIT) are proposed to select one of the available alternate paths. Finally, two techniques for reducing routing table size of the adaptive router are presented. These are called meta-table routing and economical storage. The proposed economical storage needs a routing table with only 9 and 27 entries for two and three dimensional meshes, respectively! All these design ideas are evaluated on a (16 x 16) mesh network via simulation. A fully adaptive algorithm and various traffic patterns are used to examine the performance benefits. Performance results show that the look-ahead design as well as the path selection heuristics boost network performance, while the economical storage approach turns out to be an ideal choice in comparison to full-table and meta-table options. We believe the router resulting from these three design enhancements can make adaptive routing a viable choice for interconnects.