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Unifying on-chip and inter-node switching within the Anton 2 network

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Towles, B; Grossman, JP; Greskamp, B; Shaw, DE
Published in: Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture
January 1, 2014

The design of network architectures has become increasingly complex as the chips connected by inter-node networks have emerged as distributed systems in their own right, complete with their own on-chip networks. In Anton 2, a massively parallel special-purpose supercomputer for molecular dynamics simulations, we managed this complexity by reusing the on-chip network as a switch for inter-node traffic. This unified network approach introduces several design challenges. Maintaining fairness within the inter-node network is difficult, as each hop becomes a sequence of many on-chip routing decisions. We addressed this problem with an inverse-weighted arbiter that ensures fairness with low implementation costs. Balancing the load of inter-node traffic across the on-chip network is also critical, and we adopted an optimization approach to design an appropriate routing algorithm. Finally, the on-chip routers carry inter-node traffic, so they must implement inter-node virtual channels to avoid deadlock. In order to keep the routers small and fast, we developed a deadlock-free routing algorithm that reduces the number of virtual channels by one-third relative to previous approaches. The resulting Anton 2 network implementation efficiently utilizes its inter-node channels and provides low messaging latency, while occupying a modest amount of silicon area. © 2014 IEEE.

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Published In

Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture

DOI

ISSN

1063-6897

Publication Date

January 1, 2014

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1 / 12
 

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Towles, B., Grossman, J. P., Greskamp, B., & Shaw, D. E. (2014). Unifying on-chip and inter-node switching within the Anton 2 network. In Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture (pp. 1–12). https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCA.2014.6853238
Towles, B., J. P. Grossman, B. Greskamp, and D. E. Shaw. “Unifying on-chip and inter-node switching within the Anton 2 network.” In Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 1–12, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCA.2014.6853238.
Towles B, Grossman JP, Greskamp B, Shaw DE. Unifying on-chip and inter-node switching within the Anton 2 network. In: Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 2014. p. 1–12.
Towles, B., et al. “Unifying on-chip and inter-node switching within the Anton 2 network.” Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 2014, pp. 1–12. Scopus, doi:10.1109/ISCA.2014.6853238.
Towles B, Grossman JP, Greskamp B, Shaw DE. Unifying on-chip and inter-node switching within the Anton 2 network. Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 2014. p. 1–12.

Published In

Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture

DOI

ISSN

1063-6897

Publication Date

January 1, 2014

Start / End Page

1 / 12