The extended cube connected cycles: An efficient interconnection for massively parallel systems

The hypercube structure is a very widely used interconnection topology because of its appealing topological properties. For massively parallel systems with thousands of processors, the hypercube suffers from a high node fanout which makes such systems impractical and infeasible. In this paper, we introduce an interconnection network called The Extended Cube Connected Cycles (ECCC) which is suitable for massively parallel systems. In this topology the processor fanout is fixed to four. Other attractive properties of the ECCC include a diameter of logarithmic order and a small average interprocessor communication distance which imply fast data transfer. The paper presents two algorithms for data communication in the ECCC. The first algorithm is for node-to-node communication and the second is for node-to-all broadcasting. Both algorithms take O(log N) time units, where N is the total number of processors in the system. In addition, the paper shows that a wide class of problems, the divide and conquer class, is easily and efficiently solvable on the ECCC topology. The solution of a divide and conquer problem of size N requires O(log N) time units.