Performance evaluation of ZOMA preemptive deadlock recovery mechanism for wormhole networks

This paper presents a novel deadlock recovery mechanism for fully adaptive routing in wormhole interconnection networks and its performance evaluation using simulation modeling. ZOMA is an efficient mechanism that takes advantage of the concept of wormhole switching in terms of low hardware resource requirements. The performance of the new mechanism can match that of other more expensive deadlock-recovery mechanisms, while requiring lower hardware resources that are not on the critical path of the switching process. The proposed mechanism creates a new category of deadlock recovery techniques that we refer to as preemptive as opposed to the existing progressive and regressive categories. Performance evaluation of the proposed mechanism against other routing algorithms and deadlock-recovery techniques is accomplished using the object-oriented simulation approach. The simulator, WormSim, was written in Java for various reasons. Most importantly are the modularity, hierarchy, extensibility, reusability, and flexibility aspects.