RailX: A Flexible, Scalable, and Low-Cost Network Architecture for Hyper-Scale LLM Training Systems

Abstract: Increasingly large AI workloads are calling for hyper-scale infrastructure; however, traditional interconnection network architecture is neither scalable nor cost-effective enough. Tree-based topologies such as the \textit{Rail-optimized} network are extremely expensive, while direct topologies such as \textit{Torus} have insufficient bisection bandwidth and flexibility. In this paper, we propose \textit{RailX}, a reconfigurable network architecture based on intra-node direct connectivity and inter-node circuit switching. Nodes and optical switches are physically 2D-organized, achieving better scalability than existing centralized circuit switching networks. We propose a novel interconnection method based on \textit{Hamiltonian Decomposition} theory to organize separate rail-based rings into \textit{all-to-all} topology, simultaneously optimizing ring-collective and all-to-all communication. More than $100$K chips with hyper bandwidth can be interconnected with a flat switching layer, and the diameter is only $2\sim4$ inter-node hops. The network cost per injection/All-Reduce bandwidth of \textit{RailX} is less than $10\%$ of the Fat-Tree, and the cost per bisection/All-to-All bandwidth is less than $50\%$ of the Fat-Tree. Specifically, only $\sim$\$$1.3$B is required to interconnect 200K chips with 1.8TB bandwidth. \textit{RailX} can also be used in the ML-as-a-service (MLaaS) scenario, where single or multiple training workloads with various shapes, scales, and parallelism strategies can be flexibly mapped, and failures can be worked around.