Exploring Data Vortex Network Architectures

In this work, we present an overview of the Data Vortex interconnection network, a network designed for both traditional HPC and emerging irregular and data analytics workloads. The Data Vortex network consists of a congestion-free, high-radix network switch and a Vortex Interconnection Controller (VIC) that interfaces the compute node with the rest of the network. The Data Vortex network is designed to transfer fine-grained network packets at a high injection rate, without congestioning the network or negatively impacting performance. Our results show that the Data Vortex networks is more efficient than traditional HPC networks with fine-grained data transfers. Moreover, our experiments show that a Data Vortex system achieves higher scalability even when using global synchronization primitives.