Fault-tolerant adaptive and minimal routing in mesh-connected multicomputers using extended safety levels

The minimal routing problem in mesh-connected multicomputers with faulty blocks is studied. Two dimensional (2D) meshes are used to illustrate the approach. A sufficient condition for minimal routing in 2D meshes with faulty blocks is proposed. Unlike many other models that assume all the nodes know global fault distribution, our approach is based on the concept of an extended safety level which is a special form of limited fault information. Fault information is distributed to a limited number of nodes while it is still sufficient to support minimal routing. We study the existence of minimal paths at a given source node, limited distribution of fault information, and minimal routing itself. The proposed approach is also adaptive which allows all messages to use any minimal path. Our approach is the first attempt to address adaptive and minimal routing in 2D meshes with faulty blocks using limited fault information