MediaWorm: A QoS capable router architecture for clusters

Ki Hwan Yum, Eun Jung Kim, Chita R. Das, Aniruddha S. Vaidya

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

With the increasing use of clusters in real-time applications, it has become essential to design high-performance networks with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of providing QoS in wormhole switched routers, which are widely used in designing scalable, high-performance cluster interconnects. In particular, we are interested in supporting multimedia video streams with CBR and VBR traffic, in addition to the conventional best-effort traffic. The proposed MediaWorm router uses a rate-based bandwidth allocation mechanism, called Fine-Grained VirtualClock (FGVC), to schedule network resources for different traffic classes. Our simulation results on an 8-port router indicate that it is possible to provide jitter-free delivery to VBR/CBR traffic up to an input load of 70-80 percent of link bandwidth and the presence of best-effort traffic has no adverse effect on real-time traffic. Although the MediaWorm router shows a slightly lower performance than a pipelined circuit switched (PCS) router, commercial success of wormhole switching, coupled with simpler and cheaper design, makes it an attractive alternative. Simulation of a (2 × 2) fatmesh using this router shows performance comparable to that of a single switch and suggests that clusters designed with appropriate bandwidth balance between links can provide required performance for different types of traffic.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1261-1274
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Volume13
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2002

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Signal Processing
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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