Tuple Switching Network - When Slower May Be Better

This paper reports an application dependent network design for extreme scale High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Traditional scalable network designs focus on fast point-to-point transmission of generic data packets. The proposed network focuses on the sustainability of high performance computing applications by statistical multiplexing of semantic data objects. For HPC applications using data-driven parallel processing, a tuple is a semantic object. The authors report the design and implementation of a tuple switching network for data parallel HPC applications in order to gain performance and reliability at the same time when adding computing and communication resources.