The KYKLOS multicomputer network: interconnection strategies, properties, and applications

A tree-based interconnection architecture (called KYKLOS) for multicomputer systems is proposed. While the general form of the topology consists of multiple m-ary trees sharing a common set of leaf nodes, the focus is on the dual-tree case. One version of the dual-tree KYKLOS involves a bottom tree where the ordering of descendants of nodes at every level is an m-way shuffle. This architecture provides fault tolerance and vastly improved properties over the simple double tree while retaining the simplicity and low fan-out of the m-ary tree. Different routing strategies are presented and network properties as a function of routing strategy are investigated. The O(N²) congestion at the root of the m-ary tree is reduced to O(N^1.5) while average normalized communication latencies are decreased. Applications of this architecture to facilitate parallel input/output (I/O) access and parallel processing of database operations such as the relational join are studied