An adaptive, reconfigurable interconnect for computational clusters

This paper describes the principles of an original adap-tive interconnect for a computational cluster. Torus topol-ogy (2d or 3d) is used as a basis but nodes are allowed to effectively migrate along the torus cycles. An optoelec-tronic scheme which makes such migrations possible with only local synchronisation is outlined. Between the in-stances of migration the interconnect behaves as a direct packet-routing network which constantly monitors its traffic parameters. A decentralised predictive algorithm is applied periodically to decide whether the current topology is con-sistent with the predominant traffic flow and if it is not, a reconfiguration to a better-matched topology occurs. We present simulation results that show that on some standard computational benchmarks a significant speedup is possi