Arctic Switch Fabric

• Main Author: G. Andrew Boughton
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Springer-Verlag 1997
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.18.2491; http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/pubs/ps/MIT-LCS-TM-401.ps.gz

. The Arctic Switch Fabric technology is a scalable network technology based on the Arctic router chip. Switch Fabrics are fat tree networks that are capable of providing high performance even under a heavy load of large (96 byte) packets. They have a number of diagnostic features that make them well suited for experimental computer systems. Switch Fabrics will be used in the StarT-Jr, StarT-Voyager, and Xolas computer systems at MIT. This paper describes the overall characteristics of Switch Fabrics and describes the three layers of Fabric components. These are the 16-leaf network, the four-leaf board, and the Arctic router chip. 1 Introduction The Arctic Switch Fabric technology is a scalable network technology based on the Arctic router chip [2]. An Arctic Switch Fabric is a fat tree network which supports 150 MB/sec bandwidth in each direction at each endpoint and has a bisection bandwidth equal to 150 MB/sec times the number of endpoints divided by two. A Switch Fabric is current.