A simulation study of scalable broadcast in high-performance regular networks

Broadcast is an important communication operation required by many real-world applications encountered in parallel, cluster, and grid computing environments. Broadcasting on regular networks has been widely investigated in the past. However, most of the existing algorithms handle broadcast in a sequential manner and do not scale well; as a consequence, many applications cannot be efficiently supported using existing algorithms. In an effort to avoid this limitation, this article presents a new broadcast algorithm based on coded path routing. In addition to its simplicity, the proposed algorithm has shown to be capable of performing the broadcast operation in a fixed number of message-passing steps, irrespective of the network size. An extensive simulation study has been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm under different traffic working conditions. The analysis reveals that the new algorithm exhibits superior performance characteristics over those of the well-known recursive-doubling and extended-dominating node algorithms.