Designing an exascale interconnect using multi-objective optimization

Exascale performance will be delivered by systems composed of millions of interconnected computing cores. The way these computing elements are connected with each other (network topology) has a strong impact on many performance characteristics. In this work we propose a multi-objective optimization-based framework to explore possible network topologies to be implemented in the EU-funded ExaNeSt project. The modular design of this system's interconnect provides great flexibility to design topologies optimized for specific performance targets such as communications locality, fault tolerance or energy-consumption. The generation procedure of the topologies is formulated as a three-objective optimization problem (minimizing some topological characteristics) where solutions are searched using evolutionary techniques. The analysis of the results, carried out using simulation, shows that the topologies meet the required performance objectives. In addition, a comparison with a well-known topology reveals that the generated solutions can provide better topological characteristics and also higher performance for parallel applications.