Customer Reviews

Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is the "Hennessy & Patterson" for interconnection networks area. The book covers almost all aspects of theoritical and practical issues involved in designing interconnection networks. The concepts are presented in very simple fashion. A very well written exahaustive text. Must read for any computer architect!

I had high expectations for this book given the table of contents. In particular, I was interested in chapters on arbitration, flow control, live lock and dead lock. These are topics that I have not seen comprehensive coverage on elsewhere. What I found was that most of the text is spent on describing very simple cases, in a wordy manner that actually makes the easy cases harder to understand. The book stops as soon as there is the least bit of complexity. This is very disappointing as it doesn't even mention the limited cases that I'm aware of. It certainly falls very short of providing a comprehensive survey of known complexities in these subjects.

On the topic of flow control, I was appalled to see it described as a way to utilize existing buffer resources as if the number of buffers are decided ahead of time, independent of flow control when the number of buffers are actually an integral part of flow control decisions. I was further shocked to see diagrams that only show one node in explaining flow control when flow control is fundamentally about communication between two nodes. Zooming in on one of the two nodes is really missing the basics of flow control.

As a result, I cannot recommend this book.

This book provides the reader with a comprehensive text on interconnection networks. Dally and Towles provide a thorough treatment of the impact of system packaging, topology, and routing algorithms on the overall system performance. Numerous examples of systems from both industry (Cray, SGI) and academia (MIT J-Machine) are provided to illustrate the concepts in practice. Every computer architect should own this book, whether they are doing on-chip networks, IP routers, network processors, or large-scale supercomputers.

The overall quality of the book is good.

The margins of the even number pages and the odd number pages are not the same. Even pages are organized in a way that there are more blank space in the left side of the page compare to the right side of the page, which makes it hard to read end of lines.

If I didn't buy it online, I would change it.