Loading AI tools
Universal network for provably efficient communication From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The fat tree network is a universal network for provably efficient communication.[1] It was invented by Charles E. Leiserson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.[1] k-ary n-trees, the type of fat-trees commonly used in most high-performance networks, were initially formalized in 1997.[2]
This article needs additional citations for verification. (August 2007) |
In a tree data structure, every branch has the same thickness (bandwidth), regardless of their place in the hierarchy—they are all "skinny" (skinny in this context means low-bandwidth). In a fat tree, branches nearer the top of the hierarchy are "fatter" (thicker) than branches further down the hierarchy. In a telecommunications network, the branches are data links; the varied thickness (bandwidth) of the data links allows for more efficient and technology-specific use.[citation needed]
Mesh and hypercube topologies have communication requirements that follow a rigid algorithm, and cannot be tailored to specific packaging technologies.[3]
Supercomputers that use a fat tree network[4] include the two fastest as of late 2018,[5] Summit[6] and Sierra,[7] as well as Tianhe-2,[8] the Meiko Scientific CS-2, Yellowstone, the Earth Simulator, the Cray X2, the Connection Machine CM-5, and various Altix supercomputers.[citation needed]
Mercury Computer Systems applied a variant of the fat tree topology—the hypertree network—to their multicomputers.[citation needed] In this architecture, 2 to 360 compute nodes are arranged in a circuit-switched fat tree network.[citation needed] Each node has local memory that can be mapped by any other node.[vague] Each node in this heterogeneous system could be an Intel i860, a PowerPC, or a group of three SHARC digital signal processors.[citation needed]
The fat tree network was particularly well suited to fast Fourier transform computations, which customers used for such signal processing tasks as radar, sonar, and medical imaging.[citation needed]
In August 2008, a team of computer scientists at UCSD published a scalable design for network architecture[9] that uses a topology inspired by the fat tree topology to realize networks that scale better than those of previous hierarchical networks. The architecture uses commodity switches that are cheaper and more power-efficient than high-end modular data center switches.
This topology is actually a special instance of a Clos network, rather than a fat-tree as described above. That is because the edges near the root are emulated by many links to separate parents instead of a single high-capacity link to a single parent. However, many authors continue to use the term in this way.
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.