A proposal for managing ASI fabrics

Recent years, computer performance has been significantly increased. As a consequence, data I/O systems have become bottlenecks within systems. To alleviate this problem, Advanced Switching was recently proposed as a new standard for future interconnects. The Advanced Switching specification establishes a fabric management infrastructure, which is in charge of updating the set of fabric paths each time a topological change takes place. The use of source routing and passive switches makes unfeasible the adaptation to this new technology of many existing proposals to handle topological changes in switched interconnection networks. This paper presents a fabric management mechanism for Advanced Switching, but also suitable for other source routing interconnects. Furthermore, the work presents a detailed performance evaluation for this proposal. This evaluation allows us to identify the main drawbacks of the mechanism and to define future improvements.