Performance evaluation of a hybrid optical/electrical interconnect

Abstract

In response to the need for higher-speed and affordable-cost datacenter interconnection networks, hybrid optical/electrical architectures have been proposed. Even still, a number of implementation issues remain open and little is known about the performance of real applications over such networks. To fill this gap, we present a hybrid network architecture, called HydRA, comprising commodity off-the-shelf equipment, calculate its total price using current list prices, and show its price competitiveness against fat-tree alternatives. We also report on a prototype implementation of our HydRA network that uses Ethernet switches and a custom-built software controller. We show that our HydRA network prototype manages to accelerate the execution of real parallel workloads, when compared to equal-cost electronic-only fat-tree networks.