ABCCC: An Advanced Cube Based Network for Data Centers

A new network structure called BCube Connected Crossbars (BCCC) was recently proposed. Its short diameter, good expandability and low cost make it a very promising topology for data center networks. However, it can utilize only two NIC ports of each server, which is suitable for nowadays technology, even when more ports are available. Due to technology advances, servers with more NIC ports are emerging and they will become low-cost commodities some time later. In this paper, we propose a more general server-centric data center network structure, called Advanced BCube Connected Crossbars (ABCCC), which can utilize inexpensive commodity off-the-shelf switches and servers with any fixed number of NIC ports and provide good network properties. Like BCCC, ABCCC has good expandability. When doing expansion, there is no need to alter the existing system but only to add new components into it. Thus the expansion cost that BCube suffers from can be significantly reduced in ABCCC. We also introduce an addressing scheme and an efficient routing algorithm for one-to-one communication in ABCCC. We make comprehensive comparisons between ABCCC and some popular existing structures in terms of several critical metrics, such as diameter, network size, bisection bandwidth and capital expenditure. We also conduct extensive simulations to evaluate ABCCC, which show that ABCCC achieves the best trade off among all these critical metrics and it suits for many different applications by fine tuning its parameters.