Hierarchical interconnection cache networks

The hierarchical interconnection cache network (HICN) is a novel network architecture for massively parallel processing systems. The HICN's topology is a hierarchy of multiple, three-stage interconnection cache networks. The first and third stages of each network use small, fast crossbar switches. Large, slow switching (reconfigurable) crossbars are used in the middle stages. HICN exploits a special kind of communication locality, called switching locality, offering greater flexibility and lower latency compared with the classical hierarchical networks. HICN uses small size switches for the communication routing and large size switches for setting up the network (reconfiguration) to match as close as possible the expected communication pattern. The trade-off between the routing speed and the switch size is one major factor of achieving high speed communication in massively parallel interconnection networks. The authors present efficient embeddings of several classical network topologies, such as hypercubes, complete binary trees, and grids, into HICNs. They also show that HICNs are flexibly partitionable.<>