A wormhole router with embedded broadcasting virtual bus for mesh computers

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new method of implementing bus operations on mesh wormhole routers with small additional circuits. The bus, called a virtual bus, is set up dynamically upon a request by bypassing existing datapath in wormhole routers. After bus setup, it acts as a real bus by sharing the point-to-point links of the corresponding row/column of the mesh. Simulation results show that the 2D (two-dimensional) mesh with the virtual bus outperforms the mesh with separate buses.