k-ary n-cubes versus Fat Trees

In this paper, we examine performance aspects of fat-tree topologies and compare these to k-ary ncube topologies. In particular, we apply the analytic techniques developed for cube topologies upon fat trees to understand better the characteristic of that topology. The organization of this paper is as follows: Section 1 contains an overview of k-ary n-cube and fat-tree topologies. Section 2 contains a discussion of baseline assumptions used in modeling these network topologies. Section 3 contains an analysis of network performance in terms of bisection bandwidth and network latency. Lastly we conclude in Section 4 with a general overview and criticism of the papers we read.