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Connection management in very-high-speed interconnection systems

The requirement to connect high-performance components of supercomputer systems has caused an increasing demand for connection-oriented, high-speed peer-to-peer communication. The importance of this type of communication has led to the advent of the HIPPI standard, designed to support interconnection systems for this environment. While much research has been directed towards the physical layer of these systems, not much effort has been expended to address system control issues. This thesis explores the connection management, service disciplines, configuration, and performance of very-high-speed interconnection systems. We propose several connection management policies that represent different trade-offs of cost, efficiency, and system performance. The centralized connection management policy assumes knowledge of the connection state, requires a complex implementation, but gives the best performance. At the other end of the spectrum, the distributed connection management policy assumes no knowledge of the connection state and is very simple to implement. However, its performance is lower, and its best performance can be achieved only at the cost of significant overhead to the node systems. For the implementation of the centralized policy, we introduce a connection management algorithm that gives preferential access to important connections according to a non-preemptive priority discipline, that treats connections within the same priority class equitably, and that achieves these objectives at high performance and low node overhead. We discuss the implementation of this connection management algorithm in two concrete system contexts. To support the evaluation of these policies and of the priority algorithm, we develop analytic performance models that capture the salient features of the interconnection systems, their configurations, their connection management policies, and their service disciplines. Using these models, we compare the performance and the node overhead of the connection management policies and interconnection system configurations, and we demonstrate the impact of the choice of service discipline.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8485
Date01 January 1992
CreatorsKienzle, Martin G
PublisherScholarWorks@UMass Amherst
Source SetsUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
SourceDoctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest

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