Accelerating Communication-Intensive Parallel Workloads Using Commodity Optical Switches and a Software-Configurable Control Stack

In response to the need for faster and fatter networks for large-scale HPC cluster systems, hybrid optical/electrical networks have been proposed as an affordable and high-capacity solution. Still, there is no prior work evaluating the performance of HPC workloads over such types of networks. To fill this gap, this work presents a hybrid network architecture comprising commodity-only equipment, shows its price competitiveness against fat-tree alternatives and presents a prototype implementation. We evaluated several HPC workloads over our prototype, showing that our hybrid optical/electrical network manages to significantly accelerate tested workloads, without incurring any extra cost compared to an all-electronic fat-tree network.