Uses
The Connection Machine Model CM5 supercomputer (circa 1990) used a fat tree interconnection network.
Mercury Computer Systems used a hypertree network, a variant of fat trees, in their multicomputer. From 2 to 360 compute nodes would reside in a circuit switched fat tree network, with each node having local memory that could be mapped by any other node. Each node in this heterogeneous system could be an Intel i860, a PowerPC, or a group of three SHARC DSPs. The fat tree network was particularly well suited to the FFT, which customers used for signal processing tasks like radar, sonar, medical imaging, and so on.
A fat tree network is now preferred for the Infiniband cluster architecture.
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