Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Journal A Fast and Efficient Strategy for Sub-mesh Allocation with Minimal Allocation Overhead in 3D Mesh Connected Multicomputers

This paper presents a fast and efficient contiguous allocation strategy for 3D mesh multicomputers, referred to as Turning Busy List (TBL for short), which can identify a free sub-mesh of the requested size as long as it exists in the mesh system. Turning means that the orientation of the allocation request is changed when no sub-mesh is available in the requested orientation. The TBL strategy relies on a new approach that maintains a list of allocated sub-meshes to determine all the regions consisting of nodes that cannot be used as base nodes for the requested sub-mesh. These nodes are then subtracted from the right border plane of the allocated sub-meshes to find the nodes that can be used as base nodes for the required sub-mesh size. Results from extensive simulations under a variety of system loads confirm that the TBL strategy incurs much less allocation overhead than all of the existing contiguous allocation strategies for 3D mesh multicomputers and delivers competitive performance in terms of parameters such as the average turnaround times and system utilization. Moreover, the time complexity of the TBL strategy is much lower than that of the existing strategies. Keywords-Contiguous Allocation, Turnaround Time, Utilization, Allocation Overhead, Switching Request Orientation, Simulation.