A scalable plane-based broadcast algorithm for 3D-Mesh networks

Broadcast algorithms for wormhole-switched meshes have been widely reported in the literature. However, most of these algorithms handle broadcast in a sequential manner and do not scale well with the network size. As a consequence, many parallel applications cannot be efficiently supported using existing algorithms. Motivated by these observations, this paper presents a new efficient broadcast algorithm for the mesh. The main feature of the proposed algorithm lies in its ability to perform broadcast operation with a high degree of scalability and parallelism. Furthermore, its performance is insensitive to the network size, i.e., only three message-passing steps are required to implement a broadcast operation irrespective of the network size. Results from a comparative analysis reveal that the new algorithm exhibits superior performance characteristics over those of the well-known Recursive Doubling, Extending Dominating Node.