Efficient multidestination multicast on regular router-based networks

Multidestination message passing is attractive in multicast communication because it reduces software overheads at processor nodes effectively. Combining the best features of two existing approaches (tree-based multicasting and multidestination message passing), we propose a novel tree-based multidestination (TBM) multicast scheme, which employs a new efficient multidestination message format. The TBM scheme reduces the overheads by allowing a message to be concurrently copied into one destination node while it is being forwarded to the next destination. Moreover, many multidestination messages can be transferred concurrently based on the tree-based communication paradigm, which reduces the number of communication steps. In order to support TBM, the message format provides efficient multi-address encoding that can be easily implemented at routers. By means of detailed analysis and simulation, the results show that TBM is more preferable than the traditional Umesh, Hamiltonian path and BRCP-HL(C,R) (Base Routing-Conformed Path/Hierarchical Leader with Column and Row paths) multicasting schemes, which indicates that current and future massively parallel systems can take advantage of this scheme to implement fast and scalable collective communication operations.