Helios

Abstract

The basic building block of ever larger data centers has shifted from a rack to a modular container with hundreds or even thousands of servers. Delivering scalable bandwidth among such containers is a challenge. A number of recent efforts promise full bisection bandwidth between all servers, though with significant cost, complexity, and power consumption. We present Helios, a hybrid electrical/optical switch architecture that can deliver significant reductions in the number of switching elements, cabling, cost, and power consumption relative to recently proposed data center network architectures. We explore architectural trade offs and challenges associated with realizing these benefits through the evaluation of a fully functional Helios prototype.

Optimizing Slot Utilization and Network Topology for Communication Pattern on Circuit-Switched Parallel Computing Systems

“…For each From the analysis results, it can be seen that the increased number of used slots after optimization varies according to the optimization method. An exception is that the result for src polling is the same as that for hcStoL polling because they both happen to first pick c (5,11) and then pick c (6,7) to allocate one more slot.…”

“…Our work is not the first proposal to introduce circuit switching to parallel computing networks. For example, two recent proposals (Helios [6] and c-Through [7]) have employed hybrid electric/optical switch technologies to boost the performance of datacenter networks. The AN3 network by Microsoft [4] advocates the use of standalone circuit switching for datacenters in terms of advantages of capital cost and performance.…”

An optical programmable network architecture supporting iterative multicast for data-intensive applications

“…Hybrid (electronic packet switching and optical circuit switching along with an intelligent control system) architectures can provide substantial bandwidth for interrack communications at low cost, energy consumption, and cabling complexity [1,2]. In previous work, we presented the idea of programmable network architecture featuring advanced photonic functionalities to accelerate bandwidth-intensive traffic patterns in data center networks [3].…”

Datacenter network based on Micro-Electro-Mechanical System optical switching

“…The flow control system was used to detect the flow between the cabinets and the traffic demand matrix was constructed. A hybrid electrical/optical switch architecture was introduced in paper [2], which used Edomnds algorithm to calculate the optimal optical link. MEMS optical switch was used for optical lines between pods.…”