Stardust: Divide and conquer in the data center network

Building scalable data centers, and network devices that fit within these data centers, becomes increasingly hard. With modern switches pushing at the boundary of manufacturing feasibility, being able to build simple, and scalable network fabrics is of utmost importance in data centers. We introduce Stardust: a scalable fabric architecture for data center networks, inspired by network-switch system and scaled up to data center scale. Stardust combines packet switches at the edge and disaggregated cell switches at the network fabric, using scheduled traffic. Stardust is a scalable, distributed solution, attending to the limitations of network-switch design, while offering improved performance and power savings compared with traditional solutions. With networking requirements ever increasing, Stardust predicts the elimination of packet switches, replaced by cell switches in the network, and smart network interface cards at the edges.Leverhulme Trust Isaac Newton Trus