Support for broadcast communication in multicomputer networks

A general-purpose multicomputer network must be able to efficiently handle broadcast communication because it is required by many parallel applications. Previous studies have focused mainly on the design of efficient broadcast algorithms. As a result, there has been hardly any work that assesses the performance of existing networks to handle this kind of communication. In an effort to fill this gap, this paper examines the relative performance merits of the low-dimensional k-ary n-cube and the hypermesh in the presence of broadcast traffic. The former network has been one of the widely popular networks in current practical multicomputers, while the latter has recently been proposed, and shown to exhibit attractive topological properties. The results reveal that owing to its hypergraph topology, the hypermesh represents a potential candidate as a high-performance network for future multicomputers as it provides better support for broadcast communication than the k-ary n-cube.