On a Perturbation Concept in Regular Interconnection Networks

Communication performance is one of the common issues in parallel computers and many studies are seeking for better interconnection networks. These studies offer a wide range of discussions in topology and routing algorithms, however, they use limited traffic patterns in many cases. Typically, two contrasting categories of traffic patterns are commonly used, i.e., irregular and regular ones. Thus, we should interpolate the categories’ evaluation results for recognizing general performance characteristics. This paper intends to fill the gap between the regular and irregular traffic patterns. This paper addresses the regularity in traffic patterns and proposes a perturbation concept to relax the strong regularity. Our preliminary evaluation results on 2D-torus networks reveal that the perturbation can control the level of regularity/randomness by a simple parameter. Also, this paper shows a promising side effect which can improve collective communication performance in some regular traffic patterns.