Patent attributes
A network system for a data center is described in which a switch fabric may provide full mesh interconnectivity such that any servers may communicate packet data to any other of the servers using any of a number of parallel data paths. Moreover, according to the techniques described herein, edge-positioned access nodes, optical permutation devices and core switches of the switch fabric may be configured and arranged in a way such that the parallel data paths provide single L2/L3 hop, full mesh interconnections between any pairwise combination of the access nodes, even in massive data centers having tens of thousands of servers. The plurality of optical permutation devices permute communications across the optical ports based on wavelength so as to provide, in some cases, full-mesh optical connectivity between edge-facing ports and core-facing ports.