Hybrid butterfly cube architecture for modular data centers

摘要

A hybrid Butterfly Cube (“BCube”) architecture is described herein. The BCube architecture is a server-centric network architectural design, and includes a plurality of servers. Each of the plurality of servers may have multiple network ports and serve not only as an end host, but also an intermediate relay node for other servers. The BCube architecture further includes a plurality of switches which are arranged in multiple levels. Each switch has a certain number of network ports for connecting to the servers. The BCube architecture provides multiple parallel paths between any two servers. A packet source routing protocol and a BCube source routing (BSR) protocol are used to determine which path is used for routing a packet between any two servers.