Hardware Supported Multicast in 2-D Mesh InfiniBand Networks

The multicast operation is a useful operation in parallel applications. With the hardware supported multicast of the InfiniBand architecture (IBA), we propose a multicast scheme for m times n mesh InfiniBand networks based on the XY routing scheme. The basic concept of the proposed multicast scheme is to find the union sets of the output ports of switches that are in the paths between the source node and each destination node in a multicast group. We have implemented the proposed multicast scheme on a 2D mesh InfiniBand network simulator. Several multicast cases with different message size and different traffic workload are simulated. The simulation results show that the proposed multicast scheme outperforms their corresponding unicast scheme for all simulated cases. The larger the message size, the number of multicast source nodes, and the size of the multicast group, the better speedup can be expected from the proposed multicast scheme.