Tag Archives: fat-tree

Building Fat-Tree Networks with Ethernet Hardware

Fat-tree networks work very well with InfiniBand hardware. At the same time, a fat-tree built with Ethernet switches may not always work: this is because switches must be able to discover multiple paths in a topology and balance traffic among … Continue reading

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648-Port InfiniBand FDR Switches Added to the Database

It’s Christmas time… Just a few hours, and year 2013 will become a thing of the past. Gone with it will also be the outdated InfiniBand QDR hardware that was — until today — used in the fat-tree design tool. … Continue reading

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Fat-tree and Torus Articles Now Available at arXiv.org

In case you wanted something more than an informal introduction into the world of fat-tree and torus networks — here you are. A formal problem statement (and solution!) in an academic form is given in these two articles hosted at … Continue reading

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Real Cost Comparison of Fat-tree and Torus Networks

Thanks to Mellanox Technologies, our tool that designs fat-tree and torus networks now operates with real life prices for InfiniBand hardware. Mellanox kindly provided list prices for the previous generation of switches, InfiniBand QDR: these figures are not likely to … Continue reading

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Finally, A Topology-Aware MPI Implementation

Good news from the Supercomputing-2012 (SC12) conference: ten collaborators (including a talented team led by Dr. Dhabaleswar K. Panda) presented a paper on a new approach for assigning processes to compute nodes in InfiniBand networks. Roughly, it works as follows: … Continue reading

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Torus Network: As Round As It Gets

Fat-trees have great performance characteristics, but they can be costly for some installations. Blocking fat-trees can be used as an alternative, but if your computational task has locality of communications and is well suited to torus networks — why not … Continue reading

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Three Fat-tree Alternatives for the SuperMUC Cluster

SuperMUC is a cluster supercomputer currently being deployed at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany. As of today, 8,200 cores of 110,000 have been put into operation — it is a so-called migration system for early user access. (UPD: Deployment … Continue reading

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