Coded Path Routing: A New Approach to Broadcasting in 3-D Meshes

Broadcast is an important collective communication operation required by many real-world parallel applications. This paper proposes the Coded Path Routing (or CPR for shorr) as a new approach for designing eficient broadcast algorithms for wormhole-switched multicomputer networks. A unique feature of the CPR is that a message can be delivered to an arbitrary number of destination nodes with single start-up latency. The CPR is then used to devise a new broadcast algorithm for the allport 3-dimensional mesh. The algorithm requires a fwed number of message-passing steps to implement a broadcast operation irrespective of the network size. Results ffom an extensive comparative anaiysis reveal that the proposed algorithm exhibits superior performance characteristics over those of the well-known Recursive Doubling and Extending Dominating Node algorithms,