Network performance in tightly-coupled multiprocessors typically degrades rapidly beyond network saturation. Consequently, designers must keep a network below its saturation point by reducing the load on the network. Congestion control via source throttling-a common technique to reduce the network load-prevents new packets from entering the network in the presence of congestion. Unfortunately, prior schemes to implement source throttling either lack vital global information about the network to

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... make the correct decision (whether to throttle or not) or depend on specific network parameters, or communication patterns. This paper presents a global-knowledge-based, self-tuned, congestion control technique that prevents saturation at high loads across different communication patterns for k-ary n-cube networks. Our design is composed of two key components. First, we use global information about a network to obtain a timely estimate of network congestion. We compare this estimate to a threshold value to determine when to throttle packet injection. The second component is a self-tuning mechanism that automatically determines appropriate threshold values based on throughput feedback. A combination of these two techniques provides high performance under heavy load, does not penalize performance under light load, and gracefully adapts to changes in communication patterns.