RUFT: Simplifying the Fat-Tree Topology

The fat-tree is one of the most widely-used topologies by interconnection network manufacturers. Recently, a deterministic routing algorithm that optimally balances the network traffic in fat--trees was proposed. It can not only achieve almost the same performance than adaptive routing, but also outperforms it for some traffic patterns. Nevertheless, fat-trees require a high number of switches with a non-negligible wiring complexity. In this paper, we propose replacing the fat-tree by an unidirectional multistage interconnection network referred to as reduced unidirectional fat-tree (RUFT) that uses a a simplified version of the aforementioned deterministic routing algorithm. As a consequence, switch hardware is almost reduced to the half, decreasing, in this way, power consumption, arbitration complexity, switch size, and network cost. Evaluation results show that RUFT obtains lower latency than fat-tree for low and medium traffic loads. Furthermore, in large networks, it obtains almost the same throughput than the classical fat-tree.