Towards 48-fold cabling complexity reduction in large flattened butterfly networks

Amongst data center structures, flattened butterfly (FBFly) networks have been shown to outperform their common counterparts such as fat-trees in terms of energy proportionality and cost efficiency. This efficiency is achieved by using less networking equipment (switches, ports, cables) at the expense of increased control plane complexity. In this paper we show that cabling complexity can be further reduced by an order of magnitude, by reconfiguring the optical fully meshed components into optical “pseudo”-fully meshed components. Following established methods, optical star networks are obtained by exchanging the FBFly's regular (grey) optical transceivers for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM or colored) optical transceivers and placing an arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR) in the center. Depending on the data center configuration and equipment prices, our colored FBFly (C-FBFly) proposal yields lower capital expenditure than the original FBFly. The key advantage of our structural modification of FBFly, however, is that in large FBFly networks (e.g., > 50K nodes) it reduces the number of inter-rack cables by a factor as large as 48.