General Routing Algorithms for Star Graphs

In designing algorithms for a specific parallel architecture, a programmer has to cope with topological and cardinality variations. Both these problems always increase the programmer\u27s effort. However, an ideal shared memory abstract parallel model called the parallel random access machine (PRAM) [KRUS86, KRUS88] that avoids these problems and also simple-to-program has been proposed. Unfortunately, the PRAM does not seem to be realizable in the present or even foreseeable technologies. On the other hand, a packet routing technique can be employed to simulate the PRAM on a feasible parallel architecture without significant loss of efficiency. The problem of routing is also important due to its intrinsic significance in distributed processing and its important role in the simulations among parallel models. The routing problem is defined as follows: Given a specific network and a set of packets of information in which a packet is an (origin, destination) pair. To start with, the packets are placed on their origins, one per node. These packets must be routed in parallel to their own destinations such that at most one packet passes through any link of the network at any time and all packets arrive at their destinations as quickly as possible. We are interested in a special case of the general routing problem called permutation routing in which the destinations form some permutation of the origins. A routing algorithm is said to be oblivious if the path taken by each packet is only dependent on its source and destination. An oblivious routing strategy is preferable since it will lead to a simple control structure for the individual processing elements. Also oblivious routing algorithms can be used in a distributed environment. In this paper we are concerned with only oblivious routing strategies