Poincaré: A Hyperbolic Data Center Architecture

Current trends in cloud computing suggest that both large, public clouds and small, private clouds will proliferate in the near future. Operational requirements, such as high bandwidth, dependability and smooth manageability, are similar for both types of clouds and their underlying data center architecture. Such requirements can be satisfied with utilizing fully distributed, low-overhead mechanisms at the algorithm level, and an efficient layer 2 implementation at the practical level. Adding to this, owners of evolving private data centers are in dire need of an incrementally upgradeable architecture which supports a small roll-out and continuous expansion in small quanta. In order to satisfy both requirements, we propose Poincare, a data center architecture inspired by hyperbolic tessellations, which utilizes low-overhead, greedy routing. On one hand, we show that Poincare scales to support large data centers with low diameter, high bisection bandwidth, inherent multipath and multicast capabilities, and efficient error recovery. On the other hand, Poincare supports incremental plug & play upgradability with regard to both servers and switches.