New Link Arrangements for Dragonfly Networks

Abstract

Dragonfly networks have been proposed to exploit high-radix routers and optical links for high performance computing (HPC) systems. Such networks divide the switches into groups, with a local link between each pair of switches in a group and a global link between each group. Which specific switch serves as the endpoint of each global link is determined by the network's global link arrangement. We propose two new global link arrangements, each designed using intuition of how to optimize bisection bandwidth when global links have high bandwidth relative to local links. Despite this, the new arrangements generally outperform previously-known arrangements for all bandwidth relationships.