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- Ideas from supercomputing:
- Hypercubes
- nCUBE hypercube machines, probably many others
- Torus's (?Tori?)
- IBM Blue Gene connects tens of thousands of CPUs with high bandwidth (e.g. 380MB/sec with 4.5usec avg. ping-pongs - link)
- Hypercubes
- Hosts connect to n neighbours and route amongst themselves
- Requires hosts to route frames
- => higher latencies, unless we can do it on the NIC (NetFPGA?)
- High wiring complexity
- no idea how this compares to already high complexity of hierarchical and, especially, fat-tree topologies
- May impose greater constraints on cluster geometry to appropriately establish links??
- No dedicated switching elements, simpler (electrically) point-to-point links
- Requires hosts to route frames
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