A new efficient submesh allocation strategy for mesh multicomputers

The submesh allocation problem is to recognize and locate a free submesh that can accommodate a request for a submesh of a specified size. This paper proposes a new best-fit submesh allocation strategy. The proposed strategy maintains and uses a free submesh list to get global information for free submeshes. For an allocation request, the proposed strategy tries to allocate a best-fit submesh which causes the least amount of potential fragmentation so as to preserve as many large free submeshes as possible and to prevent processor fragmentation for later requests. For this purpose, we introduce a novel function for quantifying the degree of potential fragmentation of submeshes. The proposed strategy has the complete submesh recognition capability. Extensive simulation is carried out to compare the proposed strategy with previous strategies, and experimental results indicate that the proposed strategy exhibits the best performance, along with about a 30% average improvement over the best previous strategy