PolarStar: Expanding the Scalability Horizon of Diameter-3 Networks

TL;DR

PolarStar introduces a new family of diameter-3 network topologies that significantly expand scalability, outperforming existing designs in size, resilience, and performance for various radixes.

Contribution

PolarStar presents a novel diameter-3 network topology family derived from star product graphs, achieving larger scales and better properties than prior networks.

Findings

Largest known diameter-3 topologies for most radixes

Achieves 1.3x to 6.7x scale increase over existing networks

Exhibits comparable or better performance in traffic simulations

Abstract

We present PolarStar, a novel family of diameter-3 network topologies derived from the star product of low-diameter factor graphs. PolarStar gives the largest known diameter-3 network topologies for almost all radixes, thus providing the best known scalable diameter-$3$ network. Compared to current state-of-the-art diameter-$3$ networks, PolarStar achieves $1.3\times$ geometric mean increase in scale over Bundlefly, $1.9\times$ over Dragonfly, and $6.7\times$ over {3-D} HyperX. PolarStar has many other desirable properties, including a modular layout, large bisection, high resilience to link failures and a large number of feasible configurations for every radix. We give a detailed evaluation with simulations of synthetic and real-world traffic patterns and show that PolarStar exhibits comparable or better performance than current diameter-3 networks.