A methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of traffic balancing algorithms

Abstract

Traffic balancing algorithms represent a cost-effective alternative to balance traffic in high performance interconnection networks. The importance of these algorithms is increasing since most of the current network technologies for clusters are either based on source routing or use deterministic routing. In source-routed networks, the host is responsible for selecting the suitable path among the set of paths provided by the routing algorithm. The selection of an optimal path that maximizes the channel utilization is not trivial because of the huge amount of combinations. Traffic balancing algorithms are based on heuristics in order to find an optimal solution. In this paper, we propose a new methodology based on the use of metaheuristic algorithms to evaluate the effectiveness of traffic balancing algorithms. Preliminary results show that the set of paths provided by current traffic balancing algorithms are still far from an optimized solution. Thus, it is worth continuing to design more efficient traffic balancing algorithms. © Springer-Verlag 2004.