One of the greatest challenges faced by designers of digital systems is optimizing the communication and interconnection between system components. Interconnection networks offer an attractive and economical solution to this communication crisis and are fast becoming pervasive in digital systems. Current trends suggest that this communication bottleneck will be even more problematic when designing future generations of machines. Consequently, the anatomy of an interconnection network router and science of interconnection network design will only grow in importance in the coming years.

This book offers a detailed and comprehensive presentation of the basic principles of interconnection network design, clearly illustrating them with numerous examples, chapter exercises, and case studies. It incorporates hardware-level descriptions of concepts, allowing a designer to see all the steps of the process from abstract design to concrete implementation.

·Case studies throughout the book draw on extensive author experience in designing interconnection networks over a period of more than twenty years, providing real world examples of what works, and what doesn't.

·Tightly couples concepts with implementation costs to facilitate a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs in the design of a practical network.

·A set of examples and exercises in every chapter help the reader to fully understand all the implications of every design decision.

Table of Contents


Chapter 1 Introduction to Interconnection Networks 
1.1 Three Questions About Interconnection Networks 
1.2 Uses of Interconnection Networks 
1.3 Network Basics 
1.4 History 
1.5 Organization of this Book 

Chapter 2 A Simple Interconnection Network 
2.1 Network Specifications and Constraints 
2.2 Topology 
2.3 Routing 
2.4 Flow Control 
2.5 Router Design 
2.6 Performance Analysis 
2.7 Exercises 

Chapter 3 Topology Basics 
3.1 Nomenclature 
3.2 Traffic Patterns 
3.3 Performance 
3.4 Packaging Cost 
3.5 Case Study: The SGI Origin 2000 
3.6 Bibliographic Notes 
3.7 Exercises 

Chapter 4 Butterfly Networks 
4.1 The Structure of Butterfly Networks 
4.2 Isomorphic Butterflies 
4.3 Performance and Packaging Cost 
4.4 Path Diversity and Extra Stages 
4.5 Case Study: The BBN Butterfly 
4.6 Bibliographic Notes 
4.7 Exercises 

Chapter 5 Torus Networks 
5.1 The Structure of Torus Networks 
5.2 Performance 
5.3 Building Mesh and Torus Networks 
5.4 Express Cubes 
5.5 Case Study: The MIT J-Machine 
5.6 Bibliographic Notes 
5.7 Exercises 
Chapter 6 Non-Blocking Networks 
6.1 Non-Blocking vs. Non-Interfering Networks 
6.2 Crossbar Networks 
6.3 Clos Networks 
6.4 Benes Networks 
6.5 Sorting Networks 
6.6 Case Study: The Velio VC2002 (Zeus) Grooming Switch 
6.7 Bibliographic Notes 
6.8 Exercises 

Chapter 7 Slicing and Dicing 
7.1 Concentrators and Distributors 
7.2 Slicing and Dicing 
7.3 Slicing Multistage Networks 
7.4 Case Study: Bit Slicing in the Tiny Tera 
7.5 Bibliographic Notes 
7.6 Exercises 

Chapter 8 Routing Basics 
8.1 A Routing Example 
8.2 Taxonomy of Routing Algorithms 
8.3 The Routing Relation 
8.4 Deterministic Routing 
8.5 Case Study: Dimension-Order Routing in the Cray T3D 
8.6 Bibliographic Notes 
8.7 Exercises 

Chapter 9 Oblivious Routing 
9.1 Valiant's Randomized Routing Algorithm 
9.2 Minimal Oblivious Routing 
9.3 Load-Balanced Oblivious Routing 
9.4 Analysis of Oblivious Routing 
9.5 Case Study: Oblivious Routing in the
Avici Terabit Switch Router(TSR) 
9.6 Bibliographic Notes 
9.7 Exercises 

Chapter 10 Adaptive Routing 
10.1 Adaptive Routing Basics 
10.2 Minimal Adaptive Routing 
10.3 Fully Adaptive Routing 
10.4 Load-Balanced Adaptive Routing 
10.5 Search-Based Routing 
10.6 Case Study: Adaptive Routing in the
Thinking Machines CM-5 
10.7 Bibliographic Notes 
10.8 Exercises 

Chapter 11 Routing Mechanics 
11.1 Table-Based Routing 
11.2 Algorithmic Routing 
11.3 Case Study: Oblivious Source Routing in the
IBM Vulcan Network 
11.4 Bibliographic Notes 
11.5 Exercises 

Chapter 12 Flow Control Basics 
12.1 Resources and Allocation Units 
12.2 Bufferless Flow Control 
12.3 Circuit Switching 
12.4 Bibliographic Notes 
12.5 Exercises 

Chapter 13 Buffered Flow Control 
13.1 Packet-Buffer Flow Control 
13.2 Flit-Buffer Flow Control 
13.3 Buffer Management and Backpressure 
13.4 Flit-Reservation Flow Control 
13.5 Bibliographic Notes 
13.6 Exercises 

Chapter 14 Deadlock and Livelock 
14.1 Deadlock 
14.2 Deadlock Avoidance 
14.3 Adaptive Routing 
14.4 Deadlock Recovery 
14.5 Livelock 
14.6 Case Study: Deadlock Avoidance in the Cray T3E 
14.7 Bibliographic Notes 
14.8 Exercises 

Chapter 15 Quality of Service 
15.1 Service Classes and Service Contracts 
15.2 Burstiness and Network Delays 
15.3 Implementation of Guaranteed Services 
15.4 Implementation of Best-Effort Services 
15.5 Separation of Resources 
15.6 Case Study: ATM Service Classes 
15.7 Case Study: Virtual Networks in the Avici TSR 
15.8 Bibliographic Notes 
15.9 Exercises 

Chapter 16 Router Architecture 
16.1 Basic Router Architecture 
16.2 Stalls 
16.3 Closing the Loop with Credits 
16.4 Reallocating a Channel 
16.5 Speculation and Lookahead 
16.6 Flit and Credit Encoding 
16.7 Case Study: The Alpha 21364 Router 
16.8 Bibliographic Notes 
16.9 Exercises 

Chapter 17 Router Datapath Components 
17.1 Input Buffer Organization 
17.2 Switches 
17.3 Output Organization 
17.4 Case Study: The Datapath of the IBM Colony
Router 
17.5 Bibliographic Notes 
17.6 Exercises 

Chapter 18 Arbitration 
18.1 Arbitration Timing 
18.2 Fairness 
18.3 Fixed Priority Arbiter 
18.4 Variable Priority Iterative Arbiters 
18.5 Matrix Arbiter 
18.6 Queuing Arbiter 
18.7 Exercises 

Chapter 19 Allocation 
19.1 Representations
19.2 Exact Algorithms
19.3 Separable Allocators 
19.4 Wavefront Allocator 
19.5 Incremental vs. Batch Allocation 
19.6 Multistage Allocation 
19.7 Performance of Allocators 
19.8 Case Study: The Tiny Tera Allocator 
19.9 Bibliographic Notes 
19.10 Exercises

Chapter 20 Network Interfaces 
20.1 Processor-Network Interface 
20.2 Shared-Memory Interface 
20.3 Line-Fabric Interface 
20.4 Case Study: The MIT M-Machine Network Interface 
20.5 Bibliographic Notes 
20.6 Exercises 

Chapter 21 Error Control 411
21.1 Know Thy Enemy: Failure Modes and Fault Models 
21.2 The Error Control Process: Detection, Containment,
and Recovery 
21.3 Link Level Error Control 
21.4 Router Error Control 
21.5 Network-Level Error Control 
21.6 End-to-end Error Control 
21.7 Bibliographic Notes 
21.8 Exercises 

Chapter 22 Buses 
22.1 Bus Basics 
22.2 Bus Arbitration 
22.3 High Performance Bus Protocol 
22.4 From Buses to Networks 
22.5 Case Study: The PCI Bus 
22.6 Bibliographic Notes 
22.7 Exercises 

Chapter 23 Performance Analysis 
23.1 Measures of Interconnection Network Performance 
23.2 Analysis 
23.3 Validation
23.4 Case Study: Efficiency and Loss in the
BBN Monarch Network 
23.5 Bibliographic Notes 
23.6 Exercises 

Chapter 24 Simulation 
24.1 Levels of Detail 
24.2 Network Workloads 
24.3 Simulation Measurements 
24.4 Simulator Design 
24.5 Bibliographic Notes 
24.6 Exercises 

Chapter 25 Simulation Examples 495
25.1 Routing
25.2 Flow Control Performance 
25.3 Fault Tolerance 

Appendix A Nomenclature 
Appendix B Glossary 
Appendix C Network Simulator

Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks

International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors 2003の要求清浄度について － シリコンウエハ表面と雰囲気環境に要求される清浄度, 分析方法の現状について －

In this paper we describe a database that consists of handwritten English sentences. It is based on the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus. This corpus is a collection of texts that comprise about one million word instances. The database includes 1,066 forms produced by approximately 400 different writers. A total of 82,227 word instances out of a vocabulary of 10,841 words occur in the collection. The database consists of full English sentences. It can serve as a basis for a variety of handwriting recognition tasks. However, it is expected that the database would be particularly useful for recognition tasks where linguistic knowledge beyond the lexicon level is used, because this knowledge can be automatically derived from the underlying corpus. The database also includes a few image-processing procedures for extracting the handwritten text from the forms and the segmentation of the text into lines and words.

The IAM-database: an English sentence database for offline handwriting recognition

The respiratory tract is a complex organ system that is responsible for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The human respiratory tract spans from the nostrils to the lung alveoli and is inhabited by niche-specific communities of bacteria. The microbiota of the respiratory tract probably acts as a gatekeeper that provides resistance to colonization by respiratory pathogens. The respiratory microbiota might also be involved in the maturation and maintenance of homeostasis of respiratory physiology and immunity. The ecological and environmental factors that direct the development of microbial communities in the respiratory tract and how these communities affect respiratory health are the focus of current research. Concurrently, the functions of the microbiome of the upper and lower respiratory tract in the physiology of the human host are being studied in detail. In this Review, we will discuss the epidemiological, biological and functional evidence that support the physiological role of the respiratory microbiota in the maintenance of human health.

/pdf/the-microbiota-of-the-respiratory-tract-gatekeeper-to-skzgnr4p1i.pdf

The microbiota of the respiratory tract: gatekeeper to respiratory health

To alleviate the complex communication problems that arise as the number of on-chip components increases, network-on-chip (NoC) architectures have been recently proposed to replace global interconnects. In this paper, we first provide a general description of NoC architectures and applications. Then, we enumerate several related research problems organized under five main categories: Application characterization, communication paradigm, communication infrastructure, analysis, and solution evaluation. Motivation, problem description, proposed approaches, and open issues are discussed for each problem from system, microarchitecture, and circuit perspectives. Finally, we address the interactions among these research problems and put the NoC design process into perspective.

Outstanding Research Problems in NoC Design: System, Microarchitecture, and Circuit Perspectives

Recently, processor power density has been increasing at an alarming rate resulting in high on-chip temperature. Higher temperature increases current leakage and causes poor reliability. In this paper, we propose a Predictive Dynamic Thermal Management (PDTM) based on Application-based Thermal Model (ABTM) and Core-based Thermal Model (CBTM) in the multicore systems. ABTM predicts future temperature based on the application specific thermal behavior, while CBTM estimates core temperature pattern by steady state temperature and workload. The accuracy of our prediction model is 1.6% error in average compared to the model in HybDTM [8], which has at most 5% error. Based on predicted temperature from ABTM and CBTM, the proposed PDTM can maintain the system temperature below a desired level by moving the running application from the possible overheated core to the future coolest core (migration) and reducing the processor resources (priority scheduling) within multicore systems. PDTM enables the exploration of the tradeoff between throughput and fairness in temperature-constrained multicore systems. We implement PDTM on Intel's Quad-Core system with a specific device driver to access Digital Thermal Sensor (DTS). Compared against Linux standard scheduler, PDTM can decrease average temperature about 10%, and peak temperature by 5°C with negligible impact of performance under 1%, while running single SPEC2006 benchmark. Moreover, our PDTM outperforms HRTM [10] in reducing average temperature by about 7% and peak temperature by about 3°C with performance overhead by 0.15% when running single benchmark.

Predictive dynamic thermal management for multicore systems

BMP2 Protein Regulates Osteocalcin Expression via Runx2-mediated Atf6 Gene Transcription

Metformin induces osteoblast differentiation via orphan nuclear receptor SHP-mediated transactivation of Runx2.

A multicast service of a 3GPP Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is disclosed. By allowing an RNC to manage multicast group member information by multicast services on multicast areas, when a user terminal being currently provided with an MBMS service moves, the RNC sends information on the movement of the terminal to a core network. Since the RNC notifies the core network of the terminal's movement selectively on the basis of the multicast group member information by multicast services on the multicast area, the network resource can be effectively used, and especially, unnecessary transmission of terminal's movement information from the RNC to the multicast group managing entity of the core network can be prevented.

Method for managing multicast group in mobile communication system

Chip Multi-processor (CMP) architectures have become mainstream for designing processors. With a large number of cores, Networks-on-Chip (NOCs) provide a scalable communication method for CMP architectures. NOCs must be carefully designed to meet constraints of power consumption and area, and provide ultra low latencies. Existing NOCs mostly use Dimension Order Routing (DOR) to determine the route taken by a packet in unicast traffic. However, with the development of diverse applications in CMPs, one-to-many (multicast) and one-to-all (broadcast) traffic are becoming more common. Current unicast routing cannot support multicast and broadcast traffic efficiently. In this paper, we propose Recursive Partitioning Multicast (RPM) routing and a detailed multicast wormhole router design for NOCs. RPM allows routers to select intermediate replication nodes based on the global distribution of destination nodes. This provides more path diversities, thus achieves more bandwidth-efficiency and finally improves the performance of the whole network. Our simulation results using a detailed cycle-accurate simulator show that compared with the most recent multicast scheme, RPM saves 25% of crossbar and link power, and 33% of link utilization with 50% network performance improvement. Also RPM is more scalable to large networks than the recently proposed VCTM.

Eun Jung Kim

Papers

Predictive dynamic thermal management for multicore systems

BMP2 Protein Regulates Osteocalcin Expression via Runx2-mediated Atf6 Gene Transcription

Metformin induces osteoblast differentiation via orphan nuclear receptor SHP-mediated transactivation of Runx2.

Method for managing multicast group in mobile communication system

Recursive partitioning multicast: A bandwidth-efficient routing for Networks-on-Chip