System for combining a plurality of requests referencing a common target address into a single combined request having a single reference to the target address

摘要

Requests are routed between components in a parallel computing system using multiple-phase combining. In the first phase, the original requests are decomposed into groups of requests that share the same destination address. The requests in each group are combined at an intermediate component into a single request per group. In subsequent phases, the combined requests are themselves grouped and combined in intermediate components. In the final phase, the combined requests are processed by the component containing the destination address. The addresses of the intermediate components are determined in part by hashing on the destination address and in part by a distributing function. The hashed portion of the intermediate component address tends to converge the combined requests toward the destination component during each phase. The distributing portion of the intermediate component address tends to distribute the workload evenly among the components.