Fat Tree - Related Topologies

Related Topologies

In late August 2008, a team of computer scientists at UCSD published a scalable design for network architecture that uses a topology inspired by the fat tree topology (and misleadingly called a fat-tree in their paper) to realize networks that scale better than those of previous hierarchical networks. The architecture uses commodity switches that are cheaper and more power-efficient than high-end modular data center switches.

This topology is actually a special instance of a Clos network, rather than a fat-tree as described above. That is because the edges near the root are emulated by many links to separate parents instead of a single high-capacity link to a single parent. Indeed it is not a tree at all in the graph-theoretic sense, because it contains parallel edges. However, many authors continue to use the term in this way.