Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks
- 11h 19m
- Brian Towles, William James Dally
- Elsevier Science and Technology Books, Inc.
- 2004
One of the greatest challenges faced by designers of digital systems is optimizing the communication and interconnection between system components. Interconnection networks offer an attractive and economical solution to this communication crisis and are fast becoming pervasive in digital systems. Current trends suggest that this communication bottleneck will be even more problematic when designing future generations of machines. Consequently, the anatomy of an interconnection network router and science of interconnection network design will only grow in importance in the coming years.
This book offers a detailed and comprehensive presentation of the basic principles of interconnection network design, clearly illustrating them with numerous examples, chapter exercises, and case studies. It incorporates hardware-level descriptions of concepts, allowing a designer to see all the steps of the process from abstract design to concrete implementation.
- Case studies throughout the book draw on extensive author experience in designing interconnection networks over a period of more than twenty years, providing real world examples of what works, and what doesn't.
- Tightly couples concepts with implementation costs to facilitate a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs in the design of a practical network.
- A set of examples and exercises in every chapter help the reader to fully understand all the implications of every design decision.
About the Authors
Bill Dally received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Caltech. Bill and his group have developed system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing, and synchronization technology that can be found in most large parallel computers today. While at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Bill contributed to the design of the BELLMAC32 microprocessor and designed the MARS hardware accelerator. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing Chip, which pioneered wormhole routing and virtual-channel flow control. While a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his group built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanisms from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. Bill is currently a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. His group at Stanford has developed the Imagine processor, which introduced the concepts of stream processing and partitioned register organizations. Bill has worked with Cray Research and Intel to incorporate many of these innovations in commercial parallel computers. He has also worked with Avici Systems to incorporate this technology into Internet routers, and co-founded Velio Communications to commercialize high-speed signaling technology. He is a fellow of the IEEE, a fellow of the ACM, and has received numerous honors including the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He currently leads projects on high-speed signaling, computer architecture, and network architecture. He has published more than 150 papers in these areas and is an author of the textbook Digital Systems Engineering (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Brian Towles received a B.CmpE in computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999 and an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2002. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University. His research interests include interconnection networks, network algorithms, and parallel computer architecture.
In this Book
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Introduction to Interconnection Networks
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A Simple Interconnection Network
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Topology Basics
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Butterfly Networks
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Torus Networks
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Non-Blocking Networks
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Slicing and Dicing
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Routing Basics
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Oblivious Routing
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Adaptive Routing
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Routing Mechanics
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Flow Control Basics
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Buffered Flow Control
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Deadlock and Livelock
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Quality of Service
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Router Architecture
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Router Datapath Components
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Arbitration
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Allocation
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Network Interfaces
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Error Control
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Buses
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Performance Analysis
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Simulation
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Simulation Examples
