FIR: An efficient routing strategy for tori and meshes

Recent massively parallel computers are based on clusters of PCs. These machines use one of the recently proposed standard interconnects. These interconnects either use source routing or distributed routing based on forwarding tables. While source routers are simpler, distributed routers provides more flexibility allowing the network to achieve a higher performance. Distributed routing can be implemented by a fixed hardware specific to a routing function on a given topology or by using forwarding tables. The main problem of this approach is the lack of scalability of forwarding tables. In this paper, we propose a distributed routing strategy for commercial switches, flexible interval routing, that is scalable, both in memory and routing time because it is not based on tables. At the same time, the strategy is easy to reconfigure, being able to implement the most commonly used routing algorithms in the most widely used regular topologies.