Simulation of a Mesh of Clos Wormhole Network

The pursuit of high connectivity in communication network design for multicomputers is often complicated by wiring constraints. The Mesh of Clos topology, which combines a multistage network with a mesh network, was proposed to address this trade-off between efficiency and realizability. In this paper, a simulation study is presented in order to evaluate wormhole routed Mesh of Clos communication networks. It is shown that this type of network can substantially reduce contention in comparison with more flat mesh networks. Furthermore, we found that increasing the number of flitbuffers on router devices does not necessarily lead to improved communication performance. For some application loads it may even result in a loss of performance. 1 Introduction Distributed memory MIMD multicomputers play an important role in the ever continuing pursuit of improving computational power. Usually these multicomputers are constructed by a network of nodes, where each node consists of a processor, l..