A reconfigurable, regular-topology cluster/datacenter network using commodity optical switches

Abstract

Hybrid optical/electrical interconnects using commercial optical circuit switches have been previously proposed as an attractive alternative to fully-connected electronically-switched networks. Among other advantages, such a design offers increased port density, bandwidth/port, cabling and energy efficiency, compared to conventional packet-switched counterparts. Recent proposals for such system designs have looked at small and/or medium scale networks employing hybrid interconnects. In our previous work, we presented a hybrid optical/electrical interconnect architecture targeting large-scale deployments in high-performance computing and datacenter environments. To reduce complexity, our architecture employs a regular shuffle network topology that allows for simple management and cabling. Thanks to using a single-stage core interconnect and multiple optical planes, our design can be both incrementally scaled up (in capacity) and scaled out (in the number of racks) without requiring major re-cabling and network re-configuration. In this paper, we extend the fundamentals of our existing work towards quantifying and understanding the performance of these type of systems against more diverse workload communication patterns and system design parameters. In this context, we evaluate–among other characteristics–the overhead of the reconfiguration (decomposition and routing) scheme proposed and extend our simulations to highly adversarial flow generation rate/duration values that challenge the reconfiguration latency of the system.