Power saving is required for interconnects of modern PC clusters as well as the performance improvement. To reduce the power consumption of switches with maintaining the performance, on/off link regulations that activate and deactivate the links based on the traffic load have been widely developed in interconnection networks. Depending on which operation is selected, link activation or deactivation, the available network resources are changed, thus requiring paths to be reconfigured. To maintain deadlock freedom of packet transfers, connectivity, and performance during the path changes, we propose to apply dynamic reconfiguration techniques that process packet transfer uninterruptedly to power-aware on/off interconnection networks. The dynamic network reconfiguration techniques stabilize the update of paths that are quite crucial to use power-aware on/off link techniques in interconnects of PC clusters. We investigate the performance and behavior of network reconfiguration technique as soon as the link activation or deactivation occurs. Evaluation results show that the simple dynamic reconfiguration techniques slightly reduce the peak packet latency and reconfiguration time of the change compared with existing static reconfiguration in on/off interconnection networks. A reconfiguration technique called Double Scheme reduces by up to 95% the peak packet latency caused by the on/off link operation.

Dynamic network reconfiguration is defined as the process of changing from one routing function to another while the network remains up and running. The main challenge is to avoid deadlocks and reduce packet dropping rate while keeping network service. Current approaches either require the existence of extra network resources like e.g. virtual channels, their complexity is so high that their practical applicability is limited, or they affect to the performance of the network during the reconfiguration process. In this paper we present EBR, a simple and fast method for dynamic network reconfiguration. EBR guarantees a fast and deadlock-free reconfiguration, but instead of avoiding deadlocks our mechanism is based on regressive deadlock recoveries. Thus, EBR allows cycles to be formed, and in the situation of a deadlock some packets may be dropped. However, as demonstrated, no packets need to be dropped in the working zone of the system. Also, the mechanism works in an asynchronous manner, does not require additional resources and works on any topology. In order to minimize the number of dropped packets, EBR uses an epoch marking system that guarantees that only packets potentially leading to a deadlock will be removed. Evaluation results show that EBR works efficiently in different topologies and with different routing algorithms. When compared with current proposals, EBR always gets the best numbers in all the analyzed parameters (dropped packets, latency, throughput, reconfiguration time and resources required), thus achieving the good properties of all mechanisms.

Component failures and planned component replacements cause changes in the topology and routing paths supplied by the interconnection network of a parallel processor system over time. Such changes may require the network to be reconfigured such that the existing routing function is replaced by one that enables packets to reach their intended destinations amid the changes. Efficient reconfiguration methods are desired which allow the network to function uninterruptedly over the course of the reconfiguration process while remaining free from deadlocking behavior. In this paper, we propose, evaluate, and prove the deadlock freedom of a new network reconfiguration protocol that overlaps various phases of "static" reconfiguration processes traditionally used in commercial and research systems to provide performance efficiency on par with that of recently proposed "dynamic" reconfiguration processes but without their complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed Overlapping Static Reconfiguration protocol can reduce reconfiguration time by up to 50 percent, reduce packet latency by several orders of magnitude, reduce packet dropping by an order of magnitude, and provide unhalted packet injection as compared to traditional static reconfiguration while allowing network throughput similar to dynamic reconfiguration.

Summary form only given. Currently, clusters of PCs are considered a cost-effective alternative to large parallel computers. As the number of elements increases in these systems, the probability of faults increases dramatically. Therefore, it is critical to keep the system running even in the presence of faults. The interconnection network plays a key role in its performance. InfiniBand (IBA) is a new standard interconnect suitable for clusters. Most of the fault-tolerant routing strategies proposed for massively parallel computers cannot be applied to IBA because routing and virtual channel transitions are deterministic, which prevents packets from avoiding the faults. A possible approach to provide fault-tolerance in IBA consists of using several disjoint paths between every source-destination pair of nodes and selecting the appropriate path at the source host. However, to this end, a routing algorithm able to provide enough disjoint paths, while still guaranteeing deadlock freedom, is required. We propose a simple and effective fault-tolerant methodology for IBA networks that can be applied to any network topology and meets the trade-off between fault-tolerance degree and the number of network resources devoted to it. Preliminary results show that the proposed methodology scales well and supports up to three faults in 2D and five in 3D tori using only two virtual channels.