LFBC: A Lifecycle-Managed False Bubble Flow Control Scheme for Torus Networks
摘要
This paper proposes a Lifecycle-managed False Bubble Flow Control (LFBC) scheme to address the starvation issue in torus networks caused by the introduction of critical bubbles. Traditional Flit Bubble Flow Control (FBFC) avoids deadlock by reserving idle buffers as critical bubbles, but it often leads to starvation under high load or during long-packet transmissions, degrading network performance. While the existing Bubble Dateline Flow Control (BDFC) alleviates some of these issues through virtual channel partitioning, it still faces performance bottlenecks when handling large volumes of cross-dimensional or long messages. The LFBC scheme dynamically monitors the load status of routers within the current dimension by introducing false bubbles and a dimension counter. False bubbles are temporarily marked from idle buffers and can promptly replace critical bubbles when starvation occurs, thereby reducing its frequency. The dimension counter globally tracks the distribution of false bubbles and coordinates the replacement of critical bubbles to ensure efficient resource utilization. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to FBFC and BDFC, LFBC achieves up to 40% and 30.8% reductions in latency under uniform random, transpose, shuffle, and neighbor traffic patterns, respectively, while significantly improving throughput in non-uniform traffic modes. Additionally, LFBC exhibits better adaptability and stability in long-packet transmissions and large-scale network expansions, maintaining high buffer utilization.