Evaluation of Routing Algorithms for InfiniBand Networks

Abstract

Abstract. Storage Area Networks (SANs) provide the scalability required by the IT servers. InfiniBand (IBA) interconnect is very likely to become the de facto standard for SANs as well as for NOWs. The routing algorithm is a key design issue in irregular networks. Moreover, as several virtual lanes can be used and different network issues can be considered, the performance of the routing algorithms may be affected. In this paper we evaluate three existing routing algorithms (up*/down*, DFS, and smart-routing) suitable for being applied to IBA. Evaluation has been performed by simulation under different synthetic traffic patterns and I/O traces. Simulation results show that the smart-routing algorithm achieves the highest performance.