Architecture and Performance Studies of 3D-Hyper-FleX-LION for Reconfigurable All-to-All HPC Networks

Abstract

While the Fat-Tree network topology represents the dominant state-of-art solution for large-scale HPC networks, its scalability in terms of power, latency, complexity, and cost is significantly challenged by the ever-increasing communication bandwidth among tens of thousands of heterogeneous computing nodes. We propose 3D-Hyper-FleX-LION, a flat hybrid electronic-photonic interconnect network that leverages the multichannel nature of modern multi-terabit switch ASICs (with 100 Gb/s granularity) and a reconfigurable all-to-all photonic fabric called Flex-LIONS. Compared to a Fat-Tree network interconnecting the same number of nodes and with the same oversubscription ratio, the proposed 3D-Hyper-FleX-LION offers a 20% smaller diameter, 3x lower power consumption, 10X fewer cable connections, and 4x reduction in the number of transceivers. When bandwidth reconfiguration capabilities of Flex-LIONS are exploited for non-uniform traffic workloads, simulation results indicate that 3D-Hyper-FleX-LION can achieve up to 4x improvement in energy efficiency for synthetic traffic workloads with high locality compared to Fat-Tree.