Google Sees Data Center Efficiency in 40 Gbps InfiniBand

Network engineers from Google have proposed an energy proportional data center based on a unique Butterfly Topology architecture built with 40 Gbps InfiniBand switches and adapters. The proposal was made during a recent presentation at the ACM IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) and a related paper on the topic has been posted online.


The Google paper proposes several ways to design a high-performance datacenter network whose power consumption is more proportional to the amount of traffic it is moving. The authors find that a flattened butterfly topology itself is inherently more power efficient than the other commonly proposed topologies.


Mellanox Technologies, which supplies InfiniBand solutions, said the proposal for a high-performance enterprise data center built on InfiniBand is a logical step for this technology.http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1815961.1816004