
Fat-trees: universal networks for hardware-efficient supercomputing (1985) [pdf] - espeed
http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.896/spring04/handouts/papers/fat_trees.pdf
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espeed
This was the seminal paper. This 2008 paper is interesting too:
[http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p63-alfares.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p63-alfares.pdf).

In the cloud you could implement a fat-tree topology in software via something
like Google's glcoud routing API
([https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/networking#routing](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/networking#routing))
or Open vSwitch ([http://openvswitch.org](http://openvswitch.org)).

NB: Tianhe-2 (Milky Way 2) -- listed number 1 on TOP500
([http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/](http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/))
-- uses a fat-tree topology with 13 switches each of 576 ports
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2)).

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lorenzhs
More readable link:
[http://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/tc/1985/10/06312192.pdf](http://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/tc/1985/10/06312192.pdf)

