GBC3: A Versatile Cube-Based Server-Centric Network for Data Centers

A new network structure called BCube Connected Crossbars (BCCC) was recently proposed. Its short diameter, good expandability and low cost make it a very promising topology for data center networks. However, it can utilize only two NIC ports of each server, which is suitable for nowadays technology, even though more NIC ports are available. Due to technology advances, servers with more NIC ports are emerging and they will become low-cost commodities some time later. In this paper, we propose a more general server-centric data center network structure, called GBC3, which can utilize inexpensive commodity off-the-shelf switches and servers with any fixed number of NIC ports and provide good network properties. Like BCCC, GBC3 has good expandability. When doing expansion, there is no need to alter the existing system but only to add new components into it. Thus the expansion cost that BCube suffers from can be significantly reduced in GBC3. We also introduce an addressing scheme and several efficient routing algorithms for one-to-one, one-to-all and one-to-many communications in GBC3 respectively. We make comprehensive comparisons between GBC3 and some popular existing structures in terms of several critical metrics, such as diameter, network size, bisection bandwidth and capital expenditure. We also conduct extensive experiments to evaluate GBC3, which show that GBC3 achieves the best flexibility to make tradeoff among all these critical metrics and it can suit for many different applications by fine tuning its parameters.