Patent ID: 7644254

Claim:
A parallel computer system comprising: a plurality of nodes connected by a three dimensional torus network with network connections to six adjacent nodes in X+, X−, Y+, Y−, Z+ and Z− directions that correspond to directions of a three dimensional Cartesian array; a node/network monitoring mechanism that monitors the nodes and network connections of the parallel computer system and creates a problem list of nodes and network connections; and torus network hardware on a node that dynamically routes a data packet over the three dimensional torus network based on hint bits, wherein the hint bits are a plurality of binary values in the data packet with a binary value for each network direction from the node, namely the X+, X−, Y+, Y−, Z+ and Z− directions; wherein a set hint bit indicates to the torus network hardware a direction to direct the data packet on the three dimensional torus network to avoid the nodes and network connections in the problem list.