Parallel simulation of mesh routing algorithms

Performance of a network depends primarily on the network topology, switching mechanism, flow control protocol and the underlying routing algorithm. While many routing algorithms have been proposed recently for direct networks, there is no time efficient technique to evaluate and compare all of them. A conventional routing algorithm simulation of a network on a uniprocessor takes unacceptably large computing time. The simulation can be made very time efficient by parallelizing it and running on a parallel test bed. This research is focussed on designing a parallel routing algorithm simulator for n-dimensional mesh connected networks with wormhole switching and virtual channel flow control. The research addresses partitioning, mapping, synchronization issues, and implementation of various routing algorithms for 2-D and 3-D mesh architectures. Experimental results show that the parallel simulator can provide significant speedup compared to a uniprocessor environment.