
778 CHAPTER 10 Interconnection Network Design
10.4.6 Hypercubes
It may seem that the straight edges in the butterfly are a target for potential opti-
mization since they take a packet forward to the next level in the same column.
Consider what happens if we collapse all the switches in a column into a single log
N degree switch. This has brought us full circle; it is a d-dimensional 2-ary torus!
Actually, we need to split the switches in a column in half and associate them with
the two adjacent nodes. It is called a
hypercube
or binary n-cube. Each of the N = 2
d
nodes is connected to the d nodes that differ by exactly one bit in address. Th