On multicast wormhole routing in multicomputer networks

We show that deadlocks due to dependencies on consumption channels is a fundamental problem in mul ticast wormhole routing This issue of deadlocks has not been addressed in many previously proposed multicast algo rithms We also show that deadlocks on consumption chan nels can be avoided by using multiple classes of consump tion channels and restricting the use of consumption chan nels by multicast messages In addition we present a new multicast routing algorithm column path which uses the well known e cube algorithm for multicast routing There fore this algorithm could be implemented in the existing multicomputers with minimal hardware support We present a simulation study of the performance of Hamilton path based multicast algorithms with the proposed column path algorithm Our simulations indicate that the simplistic scheme of sending one copy of a multicast message to each of its destinations exhibits good performance and that the new column path algorithm o ers higher throughput com pared to the Hamilton path based algorithms