Hierarchical fault-tolerant interconnection network

Many large-scale multicomputers communicate through message passing. This makes the design of the underlying network is a crucial issue for multicomputers. Many interconnection networks have been proposed and studied, but none has been shown to be universally applicable. A sizeable performance improvement may be possible by combining the features of two or more types of interconnection network architectures. Also, as the system size increases, there is a locality of communication among the processors which can be exploited for performance gains. Hierarchical networks provide a means to achieve both these performance improvements. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical fault-tolerant interconnection network that combines the hypercube and the torus. Simulation results show that the fault coverage and mean internodal distance for the proposed network are better than those achieved by both the hypercube and the torus.