HPE Slingshot and Dragonfly+ HPC Interconnect is the high-performance network fabric deployed in the Frontier exascale supercomputer that combines Ethernet protocol compatibility with low-latency RDMA semantics over a dragonfly+ topology — achieving 200 Gbps per port bandwidth with adaptive routing that dynamically avoids congested links, enabling the all-to-all communication patterns of MPI collective operations at scale across 74,000 compute nodes.

Slingshot Architecture

HPE Cray Slingshot is a purpose-built HPC interconnect:

• Physical layer: 200 Gbps per port (400 Gbps planned), standard Ethernet electrical (but custom protocol extensions).
• Protocol: Rosetta ASIC (switch chip) + Cassini NIC (host adapter), compatible with standard Ethernet frames but adding RDMA (via libfabric CXI provider) and enhanced QoS.
• Fabric topology: dragonfly+ (see below).
• Congestion control: hardware adaptive routing + injection throttling (no PFC needed — avoids head-of-line blocking without lossless Ethernet).
• Multitenancy: traffic classes (bulk data, latency-sensitive, system management) with QoS isolation.

Dragonfly+ Topology

• Groups: each group is a fat-tree within a rack (local switches fully connected within group).
• Global links: each group has global links to all other groups (1 or few links per group pair).
• Bisection bandwidth: O(N) links for N groups → O(1) bandwidth per node (vs fat-tree which scales O(N log N) cost for full bisection).
• Path diversity: between any two nodes, multiple paths exist (local routing within group + different global links).
• Diameter: 3 hops (source group → inter-group → destination group) for any all-to-all communication.

Adaptive Routing

Static routing (fixed path per source-destination pair) suffers from hot spots when many flows share the same global link. Adaptive routing:

• Each Rosetta switch monitors queue depths on output ports.
• For each packet: choose output port with lowest congestion (not just shortest path).
• Minimal vs non-minimal adaptive: UGAL (Universal Globally Adaptive Load-balancing) allows longer paths if they are less congested.
• Result: uniform traffic spreading across all global links, near-bisection bandwidth for all-to-all MPI.

Frontier Deployment

• 74,000 compute nodes (AMD EPYC + MI250X).
• 90 dragonfly+ groups × 64 ports per group = 5760 inter-group links.
• MPI allreduce performance: near-linear scaling to 74K nodes for bandwidth-bound collectives.
• Slingshot vs InfiniBand: Ethernet compatibility (standard switches usable for storage/management), vs IB's lower latency and native RDMA.

Software Integration

• libfabric CXI provider: RDMA semantics over Slingshot, used by OpenMPI, MPICH, SHMEM.
• PMI (Process Management Interface): job launch and rank-to-node mapping.
• NUMA-aware allocation: HPE PBS/SLURM integration for Slingshot topology-aware job placement.

HPE Slingshot is the network fabric that enables exascale computation by combining the cost and compatibility benefits of Ethernet with the performance and congestion management of purpose-built HPC interconnects — proving that a dragonfly+ topology with adaptive routing can deliver near-theoretical bisection bandwidth to tens of thousands of GPU-accelerated nodes.