Deadlock-free routing in InfiniBand/sup TM/ through destination renaming

The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) defines a switch-based network with point-to-point links that supports any topology defined by the user including irregular ones, in order to provide flexibility and incremental expansion capability. Routing in IBA is distributed, based on forwarding tables, and only considers the packet destination ID for routing within subnets in order to drastically reduce forwarding table size. Unfortunately, the forwarding tables for most of the previously proposed routing algorithms for irregular topologies consider both the destination ID and the input channel. Therefore, these popular routing algorithms for irregular topologies may not be usable in InfiniBand networks because they do nor conform to the IBA specifications. In this paper we propose an easy-to-implement strategy to adapt the forwarding tables already computed following any routing algorithm that considers the destination ID and the input channel into the required IBA forwarding table format. The resulting routing algorithm is deadlock-free on IBA. Indeed, the originally computed paths are not modified at all. Hence, the proposed strategy does not degrade performance with respect to the original routing scheme.