An Optimized Broadcasting Technique for WK-Recursive Topologies

This paper describes a study carried out on behalf of a research within the Strategic Project on Parallel Computation, supported by the National Research Council of Italy, where the Hybrid Computing Research Center is collaborating with the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa on the design of a massively parallel system based on VLSI components having a direct network message passing architecture. Within this project the Authors purposely devised a new general class of communication network topology they called WK-recursive, as an effort to meet the demand of scalable and efficient communication structures for very large parallel systems. Object of the present paper is to describe an optimized technique to perform effective broadcasting operations on networks belonging to the WK-recursive class, one prototype of which has been realized at the Hybrid Computing Research Center. This technique is characterized by a number of properties which will be profitably exploited in the design of the distributed operating system for such a massively parallel system, especially as far as the kernel run-time support is concerned