PolarFly: A Cost-Effective and Flexible Low-Diameter Topology

Abstract: In this paper we present PolarFly, a diameter-2 network topology based on the Erdos-Renyi family of polarity graphs from finite geometry. This is a highly scalable low-diameter topology that asymptotically reaches the Moore bound on the number of nodes for a given network degree and diameter PolarFly achieves high Moore bound efficiency even for the moderate radixes commonly seen in current and near-future routers, reaching more than 96% of the theoretical peak. It also offers more feasible router degrees than the state-of-the-art solutions, greatly adding to the selection of scalable diameter-2 networks. PolarFly enjoys many other topological properties highly relevant in practice, such as a modular design and expandability that allow incremental growth in network size without rewiring the whole network. Our evaluation shows that PolarFly outperforms competitive networks in terms of scalability, cost and performance for various traffic patterns.