An empirical study of hierarchical division for mesh-structured networks

A parallel/distributed system consists of a collection of processes, which are distributed over a network of processors, and work in a cooperative manner to fulfill various tasks. A hierarchical approach is to group and organize the distributed processes into a logical hierarchy of multiple levels to achieve better system performance. It has been proposed as an effective way to solve various problems in distributed computing, such as distributed monitoring, resource scheduling, and network routing. In [21], we studied hierarchical configuration for mesh and hypercube networks to the end of achieving better system performance. In particular, we proposed theoretically optimal hierarchy for mesh and hypercube, so that the total traffic flow over the network is minimized. In this paper, we present the experimental results to establish the practical relevance of mesh hierarchy proposed in [21]. We simulated situations for multi-level division, real network loading scenarios, random data aggregation rates, and different division sizes other than derived in [21]. The simulation results not only show that the analytically obtained hierarchy works well for many realistic settings, but also offer some useful insights into the proposed hierarchy scheme.