In recent years, ICON has particularly focused on the following three topics concerning interconnection networks: 1) topology agnostic routing - deadlock free strategies for routing in nonregular networks; 2) fault-tolerance - resilience to components that fail without warning; and 3) dynamic reconfiguration -the change of routing function without causing deadlocked states during the transitional phase.
ICON's research results have been published in several of the most respected IEEE journals and magazines within our field. Furthermore, some of ICON's solutions have had a major impact on the routing architecture of modern supercomputers.
ICON has established a research project with Sun Microsystems, where the allover objective is to advance HPC networking technology based on InfiniBand. It is a jointly funded project that will undertake fundamental research in interconnection networks and high performance computing, in order to meet the network technology requirements for the next generation of supercomputers. The agreement was announced October 2008 for an initial three year life span. The project will be hosted on-site at Simula and manned by ICON researchers (one post. doc. and two PhD candidates) that will cooperate closely with Sun Microsystems in Norway.
In years to come, ICON also aims to develop solutions for Networks on-Chip (NoC/multi-core) systems, encompassing flexible and power efficient routing and job allocation, and exploring the latency-power trade-off in the design of NoC topologies. In the future ICON wll also focus on solutions for Utility Computing Data Centres (UCDCs), encompassing flexible partitioning (virtualization), fault-tolerance, and predictable service.
Paper accepted at ICC 2010
Invited talk by Kang Li 15. December
