Editing Fat tree (section)

==Related topologies==
In August 2008, a team of [[computer scientist]]s at [[UCSD]] published a scalable design for network architecture<ref name="FaLouVah08">{{cite book |first1=Mohammad |last1=Al-Fares |first2=Alexander |last2=Loukissas |first3=Amin |last3=Vahdat |chapter=A scalable, commodity data center network architecture |title=Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication |isbn=978-1-60558-175-0 |pages=63–74 |year=2008 |doi=10.1145/1402958.1402967 |publisher=ACM |s2cid=65842 |chapter-url=http://www.cs.kent.edu/~javed/class-CXNET09S/papers-CXNET-2009/FaLV08-DataCenter-interconnect-p63-alfares.pdf }}</ref> that uses a topology inspired by the fat tree topology to realize networks that scale better than those of previous hierarchical networks.  The architecture uses commodity switches that are cheaper and more power-efficient than high-end modular data center switches.

This topology is actually a special instance of a [[Clos network]], rather than a fat-tree as described above.  That is because the edges near the root are emulated by many links to separate parents instead of a single high-capacity link to a single parent.  However, many authors continue to use the term in this way.