|
Description:
University researchers have invented a way to leverage a set of largely commodity Ethernet switches to support the full bisection bandwidth of clusters of scalable size, even with tens of thousands of compute nodes. The invention uses an approach that requires no modifications to the end host network interface, operating system, or applications, and so it is fully backward compatible with Ethernet, IP, and TCP.
This invention presents a reasonable alternative to increasing bandwidth using specialized hardware and communication protocols (such as Infiniband or Myrinet). The invention meets the following design goals:
- Scalable interconnection bandwidth: an arbitrary host in the data center can communicate with any other host in the network at the full bandwidth of its local network interface.
- Economically scaleable: just as personal computers became the basis for large-scale computing environments, this invention can leverage cheap off-the-shelf Ethernet switches the basis for high-performance large-scale data center networks.
- Backward Compatibility: existing data centers, which almost universally leverage commodity Ethernet and run IP, can take advantage of this new interconnect architecture with no modifications.
- Packaging and cabling efficiency: the topology must not introduce complexities to the hardware configuration and management.
Case No: SD2008-223
Keywords: data transfer, networking, Ethernet, IP, TCP
Inquiries To: invent@ucsd.edu
|
