Performance evaluation of message passing strategies and routing policies in multicomputers

This paper describes a discrete-event simulator designed for the analysis of communication switching techniques adopted in distributed memory multicomputers with asynchronous direct links. The motivation comes from the observation that, even if a wide set of routing strategies have been proposed, an extensive comparison analysis among routing strategies working under different workload characteristics is still lacking in the literature. For these purposes, we have designed and implemented a modular simulator, namely IntNetSim, that solves the models of a wide combination of message passing techniques, routing policies, link conflict resolution strategies, and traffic conditions. For each class of instances, a large variety of simulation runs permits us to select the best performance technique that reduces message transmission time and/or retards saturation of the network under definite workload conditions.