A routing scheme using intention packets is contemplated. At times, one or more switching devices within a network may become overloaded with traffic or may encounter other adverse transmission conditions. When this occurs, a switching device may drop one or more packets to alleviate some of the congestion or other adverse condition. The switching devices may support a particular amount of resources (e.g. bandwidth, buffers, etc.) in and out of each of their ports. When a packet or a header port…

A routing scheme using intention packets is contemplated. At times, one or more switching devices within a network may become overloaded with traffic or may encounter other adverse transmission conditions. When this occurs, a switching device may drop one or more packets to alleviate some of the congestion or other adverse condition. The switching devices may support a particular amount of resources (e.g. bandwidth, buffers, etc.) in and out of each of their ports. When a packet or a header port…

A storage system is described including a two dimensional array of disk drives having multiple logical rows of drives and multiple logical columns of drives, and at least one drive array controller configured to store data in stripes (e.g., across the logical rows). A given drive array controller calculates and stores: row error correction data for each stripe of data across each one of the logical rows on one of the drives for each row, and column error correction data for column data grouped (…

An apparatus and method for implementing a transmission scheme employing intention is contemplated. At times, a switching device within a network may detect a fault, corruption, or congestion. When a switching device detects a fault, corruption, or congestion, it may drop one or more packets to resolve the fault, corruption or congestion. When a packet is dropped, the switching device that dropped it may create an intention, packet that corresponds to the dropped packet. The switching device may…

Various embodiments of a scalable routing system for use in an interconnection fabric are disclosed. In this routing scheme, a routing directive describes a route in the interconnection fabric between a sending node and a destination node. Either the sending node or a sending device connected to the sending node encodes the routing directive in a message to be sent to the destination node. The routing directive may include a variable number of segments. Each segment includes a distance component…

A method and system for mapping nodes in an M.times.N torus interconnection fabric of nodes is provided. The method includes generating an observed mapping of the nodes in the interconnection fabric showing a location of a first node relative to an x-axis of the fabric and relative to a y-axis of the fabric, comparing the observed mapping of the nodes to a set of expected mappings, and identifying the expected mapping which is most similar to the observed mapping.

A method for providing a lossless, compressed topology aggregation of a group of switching nodes and interconnecting links. The switching nodes are divided into border vertices having communications with other networks or subnetworks and interior vertices. The method determines non-redundant optimal paths between different pairs of border vertices. These paths are aggregated for storage at individual border switching nodes to enable the characteristic, metric or attribute to be advertised outsid…

The method of the present invention provides efficient aggregation of link metrics for a subnetwork in a communication network having a plurality of interconnected subnetworks that consist of nodes and links. The method includes: selecting, by a predetermined subnetwork leader, a subset of nodes in the subnetwork to be exposed nodes; for each link metric, generating, by the subnetwork leader, a spanning tree virtual topology connecting the exposed nodes; and assigning link metric values to the v…

The present invention provides a method (300) and system (200) of contention-based multiple access for the reservation subchannel to support a large population of users with diverse QoS requirements wherein users are permitted to transmit reservation messages in reservation slots in a coordinated manner to contend for the privilege to transmit data messages in the data slots. In the event of a collision in the reservation slots, a prioritized contention resolution algorithm is used to resolve th…

A method and apparatus in a multicast transmission system for routing packets including a scalable architecture that supports QoS. Redundant state information is minimized in the MOSPF multicast forwarding cache of each router in the communications system, thereby rendering MOSPF considerably more scalable. In a particular embodiment, cache redundancy is minimized by using a class of graph compression algorithms to solve a graph compression problem. In another embodiment, the forwarding cache is…