High speed adaptive rack-scale fabrics

Abstract

Rack-scale systems contain thousands of densely packed con- nected components. While a data center may accommodate a fully provisioned network, rack-scale systems demand a more compact and versatile network that would even up within a heavily populated system. Unless the critical path between communicating hosts is made faster, distributed rack-scale applications cannot scale. We present adaptive rack-scale fabrics, an architecture that uses Physical Layer Primitives, coupled with a Closed Ring Control. The resulting fabric uses pre-fetching techniques, but at the physical layer of the interconnect, to optimize performance within strict power-budget limitations.