As Moore’s Law slows down, packet switch capabilities are falling behind datacenter demands. Recent hardware advances have enabled the new switching technology of nanosecond-scale rapid circuit switches. Combined with novel network designs, these have the potential to fully replace packet switches. This talk presents the Oblivious Reconfigurable Network (ORN) design paradigm which is ideally suited to this new switching technology. I describe how to design ORNs that work at datacenter scale, supporting tens of thousands of network nodes. And, I discuss an implementation, Shale, whose tradeoffs in latency and throughput are Pareto optimal among all ORN designs achieving orders of magnitude better latency and memory requirements than prior ORN designs at such scales.

A paper of this works appears in SIGCOMM 2024: “Shale: A Practical, Scalable Oblivious Reconfigural Networks”