Google Jupiter Super Block

Today at the 2015 Open Network Summit, we are revealing for the first time the details of five generations of our in-house network technology. From Firehose, our first in-house datacenter network, ten years ago to our latest-generation Jupiter network, we’ve increased the capacity of a single datacenter network more than 100x. Our current generation — Jupiter fabrics — can deliver more than 1 Petabit/sec of total bisection bandwidth. To put this in perspective, such capacity would be enough for 100,000 servers to exchange information at 10Gb/s each, enough to read the entire scanned contents of the Library of Congress in less than 1/10th of a second.

We used three key principles in designing our datacenter networks:

• We arrange our network around a Clos topology, a network configuration where a collection of smaller (cheaper) switches are arranged to provide the properties of a much larger logical switch.
• We use a centralized software control stack to manage thousands of switches within the data center, making them effectively act as one large fabric.
• We build our own software and hardware using silicon from vendors, relying less on standard Internet protocols and more on custom protocols tailored to the data center

Google, 01. August 2015