Over time, the tech industry has developed and deployed variations on the fat-tree architecture. But the design has room for improvement. It’s generally reliable, but also rigid, inefficient, and requires complex cabling. As in, actual physical cables.
If you’ve ever been in a data center or an office building’s server room, you’ve likely seen nests of colorful cables spilling out of metal racks. Cabling is one of the greatest costs in networking, Rehder says, and Amazon’s global data centers are currently connected with 20 million kilometers of fiber optic cables. That’s roughly the distance it would take to travel from Earth to the moon and back 25 times.
In 2012, as the demand for cloud computing services was exploding, a group of researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, including Godfrey, introduced a concept known as Jellyfish. Fixed network designs in use at the time were struggling to meet growing demand, so the researchers proposed a…