• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.177-187
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• 2000

In the past several years, many systems which adopted ring topology with high-speed unidirectional point-to-point links have emerged to overcome the limit of bus for interconnection network of clustered multiprocessor system. However, rapid increase of processor speed and performance improvement of local bus and memory system limit scalability of system with point-to-point link of standard bandwidth. Therefore, necessity to extend bandwidth is emphasized. In this paper, we adopt PANDA system as base model, which is clustering-based multiprocessor system. By simulating a model adopting commercial processor and local bus specification, we show that point-to-point link is bottleneck of system performance, and bandwidth expansion by more than 200% is needed. To expand bandwidth of interconnection network, it needs excessive design cost and time to develop new point-to-point link with doubled bandwidth. As an alternative to double bandwidth, we propose several ways to implement dual ring -simple dual ring, transaction-separated dual ring, direction-separated dual ring- by using off-the-shelf point-to-point links with IEEE standard bandwidth. We analyze pros. and cons. of each model compared with doubled-bandwidth single ring by simulation.