The fat tree network is a universal network for provably efficient communication.[1] It was invented by Charles E. Leiserson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.[1] k-ary n-trees, the type of fat-trees commonly used in most high-performance networks, were initially formalized in 1997.[2]
In a treedata structure, every branch has the same thickness (bandwidth), regardless of their place in the hierarchy—they are all "skinny" (skinny in this context means low-bandwidth). In a fat tree, branches nearer the top of the hierarchy are "fatter" (thicker) than branches further down the hierarchy. In a telecommunications network, the branches are data links; the varied thickness (bandwidth) of the data links allows for more efficient and technology-specific use.Шаблон:Citation needed
Mesh and hypercube topologies have communication requirements that follow a rigid algorithm, and cannot be tailored to specific packaging technologies.[3]
In August 2008, a team of computer scientists at UCSD published a scalable design for network architecture[9] that uses a topology inspired by the fat tree topology to realize networks that scale better than those of previous hierarchical networks. The architecture uses commodity switches that are cheaper and more power-efficient than high-end modular data center switches.
This topology is actually a special instance of a Clos network, rather than a fat-tree as described above. That is because the edges near the root are emulated by many links to separate parents instead of a single high-capacity link to a single parent. However, many authors continue to use the term in this way.
