Bidirectional Ring: An Alternative to the Hierarchy of Unidirectional Rings

. A hierarchy of unidirectional rings has been used successfullyin distributed shared-memory multiprocessors. The fixed cluster size ofthe hierarchy prevents full exploitation of communication locality. Thebidirectional ring is presented as an alternative to the hierarchy. Its relativeperformance is evaluated for a variety of memory access patternsand network sizes. It gives superior performance for low communicationlocality and for large networks. Another useful feature of the...