Slim Fly: A Cost Effective Low-Diameter Network Topology

TL;DR

Slim Fly is a novel network topology inspired by the degree-diameter problem, offering low latency, high bandwidth, resilience, and cost efficiency for datacenter and HPC networks.

Contribution

It introduces the Slim Fly topology, a cost-effective, low-diameter network design that approaches optimal network diameter and includes routing schemes and physical layouts.

Findings

Slim Fly reduces latency compared to traditional topologies

It offers high resilience and bandwidth efficiency

Cost and power consumption are significantly lower

Abstract

We introduce a high-performance cost-effective network topology called Slim Fly that approaches the theoretically optimal network diameter. Slim Fly is based on graphs that approximate the solution to the degree-diameter problem. We analyze Slim Fly and compare it to both traditional and state-of-the-art networks. Our analysis shows that Slim Fly has significant advantages over other topologies in latency, bandwidth, resiliency, cost, and power consumption. Finally, we propose deadlock-free routing schemes and physical layouts for large computing centers as well as a detailed cost and power model. Slim Fly enables constructing cost effective and highly resilient datacenter and HPC networks that offer low latency and high bandwidth under different HPC workloads such as stencil or graph computations.