Fat Tree

Fat Tree

The fat tree network, invented by Charles E. Leiserson of MIT, is a universal network for provably efficient communication. Unlike an ordinary computer scientist's notion of a tree, which has "skinny" links all over, the links in a fat-tree become "fatter" as one moves up the tree towards the root. By judiciously choosing the fatness of links, the network can be tailored to efficiently use any bandwidth made available by packaging and communications technology. In contrast, other communications networks, such as hypercubes and meshes, have communication requirements that follow a prespecified mathematical law, and therefore cannot be tailored to specific packaging technologies.