Teaching with Opnet

Graduate level course SC749 Interconnection Networks for Multicomputers, uses Opnet to  complement the lectures. In this course students have three laboratory sessions that use Opnet to model and simulate routing algorithms in tightly coupled multicomputer environments. So far only small scale 2-D 4x4 meshes have been used to demonstrate and to study performance.  After a tutorial on packet switching, students are introduced to the process modeling. Students in groups of three or four student per team, design the modules of a typical node. For our experiments, a node consists of a processing element and a routing element. Processing element is composed of a generator process module, generator queue module, a sink queue module  and a sink module. Router on the other hand is just a process module. All communication with the routers, local or inter node use flit level handshaking and conform to wormhole routing. Students design the routing module that implement deadlock free routing algorithms, and study network latency to determine the saturation point for the underlying algorithm in the given interconnection network. Following node model illustrates the components of  typical node in our 2-D  mesh.