In this paper, we propose an unorthodox topology for datacenters that eliminates all hierarchical switches in favor of connecting nodes at random according to a small-worldinspired distribution. Specifically, we examine topologies where the underlying nodes are connected at the small scale in a regular pattern, such as a ring, torus or cube, such that every node can route efficiently to nodes in its immediate vicinity, and amended by the addition of random links to nodes throughout the datacenter, such that a greedy algorithm can route packets to far away locations efficiently. Coupled with geographical address assignment, the resulting network can provide content routing in addition to traditional routing, and thus efficiently implement key-value stores. The irregular but self-similar nature of the network facilitates constructing large networks easily using prewired, commodity racks. We show that Small-World Datacenters can achieve higher bandwidth and fault tolerance compared to both conventional hierarchical datacenters as well as the recently proposed CamCube topology. Coupled with hardware acceleration for packet switching, small-world datacenters can achieve an order of magnitude higher bandwidth than a conventional datacenter, depending on the network traffic.
We introduce a novel data center design based on emerging 60 GHz RF technology that uses wires only to deliver power to its server nodes. Fundamental limitation of wireless data centers is that the maximum number of live connections in the network is directly proportional to the full volume occupied by the data center divided by the radiating volume of a single antenna beam. Consequently, we integrate wireless transceivers and switching logic within each server node and collocate them in cylindric racks to establish a semi-regular mesh topology. Our exploration of the resulting design space shows that while attaining comparable bandwidth, our wireless data center exhibits substantially higher fault tolerance, improved latency, lower power consumption, and easier maintenance than a conventional wired data center.
Conventional datacenters, based on wired networks, entail high wiring costs, suffer from performance bottlenecks, and have low resilience to network failures. In this paper, we investigate a radically new methodology for building wire-free datacenters based on emerging 60-GHz radio frequency (RF) technology. We propose a novel rack design and a resulting network topology inspired by Cayley graphs that provide a dense interconnect. Our exploration of the resulting design space shows that wireless datacenters built with this methodology can potentially attain higher aggregate bandwidth, lower latency, and substantially higher fault tolerance than a conventional wired datacenter while improving ease of construction and maintenance.
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