A Framework for Designing Deadlock-Free Wormhole Routing Algorithms

This paper presents a framework to design fully-adaptive, deadlock-free wormhole algorithms for a variety of network topologies. The main theoretical contributions are (a) design of new wormhole algorithms using store-and-forward algorithms, (b) a sufficient condition for deadlock free routing by the wormhole algorithms so designed, and (c) a sufficient condition for deadlock free routing by these wormhole algorithms with centralized flit buffers shared among multiple channels. To illustrate the theory, several wormhole algorithms based on store-and-forward hop schemes are designed. The hop-based wormhole algorithms can be applied to a variety of networks including torus, mesh, de Brujin, and a class of Cayley networks, with the best known bounds on virtual channels for minimal routing on the last two classes of networks. An analysis of the resource requirements and performances of a proposed algorithm, called negative-hop algorithm, with some of the previously proposed algorithms for torus and mesh networks is presented.