Original version
Concurrency and Computation. 2017, 29 (13), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4065
Abstract
Exascale computing systems are being built with thousands of nodes. The high number of components of these systems significantly increases the probability of failure. A key component for them is the interconnection network. If failures occur in the interconnection network, they may isolate a large fraction of the machine. For this reason, an efficient fault‐tolerant mechanism is needed to keep the system interconnected, even in the presence of faults. A recently proposed topology for these large systems is the hybrid k‐ary n‐direct s‐indirect family that provides optimal performance and connectivity at a reduced hardware cost. This paper presents a fault‐tolerant routing methodology for the k‐ary n‐direct s‐indirect topology that degrades performance gracefully in presence of faults and tolerates a large number of faults without disabling any healthy computing node. In order to tolerate network failures, the methodology uses a simple mechanism. For any source‐destination pair, if necessary, packets are forwarded to the destination node through a set of intermediate nodes (without being ejected from the network) with the aim of circumventing faults. The evaluation results shows that the proposed methodology tolerates a large number of faults. For instance, it is able to tolerate more than 99.5% of fault combinations when there are 10 faults in a 3‐D network with 1000 nodes using only 1 intermediate node and more than 99.98% if 2 intermediate nodes are used. Furthermore, the methodology offers a gracious performance degradation. As an example, performance degrades only by 1% for a 2‐D network with 1024 nodes and 1% faulty links.