The Grid-Pyramid: A Generalized Pyramid Network

The Pyramid network is a desirable network topology used as both software data-structure and hardware architecture. In this paper, we propose a general definition for a class of pyramid networks that are based on grid connections between the nodes in each level. Contrary to the conventional pyramid network in which the nodes in each level form a mesh, the connections between these nodes may also be according to other grid-based topologies such as the torus, hypermesh or WK-recursive. Such pyramid networks form a wide class of interconnection networks that possess rich topological properties. We study a number of important properties of these topologies for general-purpose parallel processing applications. In particular, we prove that such pyramids are Hamiltonian-connected, i.e. for any arbitrary pair of nodes in the network there exists at least one Hamiltonian path between the two given nodes, and pancyclic, i.e. any cycle of length 3, 4 … and N, can be embedded in a given N-node pyramid network. It is also proven that two link-disjoint Hamiltonian cycles exist in the torus-pyramid and hypermesh-pyramid networks.