Back to feed
Book Open access

Balanced Sparse Tree: A Scalable Network Topology for Large Language Models

Aug 2026 · 0 citations · 31 references

TL;DR

This work proposes a novel topology named the Balanced Sparse Tree (BST), which is a topology characterized by symmetric design and sparse connections, motivated by hypergraph theory and Steiner Systems, and demonstrates the superiority of BST over the state-of-the-art in network scale, latency, bandwidth, and cost.

Abstract

The development of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed unprecedented demand on the computing network, specifically for large-scale, few-hops, and low-latency, which directly underpin LLM task efficiency. However, mainstream topologies such as Clos suffer from costs and latency, while topologies with good scalability have symmetric or collective communication issues. In order to achieve a favorable balance among design metrics, we propose a novel topology named the Balanced Sparse Tree (BST), which is a topology characterized by symmetric design and sparse connections, motivated by hypergraph theory and Steiner Systems. Its degree-diameter upper-bound approaches the Moore Bound for Bipartite Biregular graphs, larger than other known dia-meter-2 topologies. Furthermore, we incorporate differentiated routing, deadlock freedom, and topology-affined deployment into BST. Testbed experiments, simulations, together with modeling analysis, demonstrate the superiority of BST over the state-of-the-art in network scale, latency, bandwidth, and cost. With equivalent scales, BST outperforms Clos with a 50% cost reduction while maintaining comparable performance for AI workloads. Furthermore, BST delivers a 3.9%–11.8% gain in collective communications and has 13.4% improvement over state-of-the-art topologies.

Read PDF

Similar papers

Preprint Jul 2026

When is Routing Meaningful? Diversity and Robustness in Language Model Societies

Routing policies for multi-model systems are evaluated almost exclusively on task accuracy and inference cost. We argue that two properties, orthogonal to performance, determine whether routing is meaningful. First, the society of actors must be behaviourally differentiated: if all actors respond identically, routing is vacuous. Second, the routing policy must be stable: surface-form variants of a query should be assigned to the same actor. High task accuracy is compatible with violating both properties, since a router can operate over a redundant society or assign queries inconsistently, preventing specialisation regardless of performance. We adapt Hierarchic Social Entropy (HSE) to language-model societies and introduce a perturbation-based robustness metric to diagnose these failure modes. Applied to EmbedLLM and RouterBench, we find that HSE exhibits strong diminishing returns, suggesting that a curated subset of fewer than ten agents recovers most available diversity in a large pool -- a practical coreset heuristic for society design. We further find that KNN routers gain accuracy from specialist societies but collapse in robustness under perturbation, while prompted routing remains stable across all perturbation types -- illustrating that accuracy and meaningfulness can sharply diverge.

Fantine Huot, Michael Kaisers, Mirella Lapata · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

AlphaRoute: Large Language Models as Semantic Optimizers for Multi-Objective Routing

Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) global routing is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem requiring signal net assignment across capacity-constrained 3D grids while minimizing congestion, wirelength, and via transitions. Because traditional heuristics rely on static penalty schedules that fail on complex congestion topologies, we present AlphaRoute: a multi-objective adaptive search framework reformulating rip-up and reroute (R&R) into a dynamic optimization system. We introduce SHAP-based overflow decomposition to isolate per-net congestion, driving targeted subgraph extraction via 3D Dijkstra maze routing and an adaptive PathFinder policy. Crucially, AlphaRoute employs Large Language Models (LLMs) as semantic policy optimizers. Bounded by a deterministic knowledge graph, the LLMs interpret congestion metrics to dynamically adjust penalty parameters. Evaluated on ISPD 2025 benchmarks, AlphaRoute reduces overflow by 98.6% on MEMPOOL. On the constrained ARIANE design, we achieve an overflow of 146,109 (a 29.8x reduction in overflow over the state of the art), yielding a penalized score of S_orig = 0.0538 versus the State-of-the-art (SOTA) 1.780. These results demonstrate that superior algorithmic search geometry can overcome the latency of interpreted Python implementations.

Kabir Murjani, Mishri Bhavsar, Manish I. Patel et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

WISERouter: LLM Routing with Workload Budget Constraint

Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across multiple domains, but using the most capable model for every query is prohibitive at scale. LLM routing exploits diversity in model capability and cost by assigning each query to a suitable model to balance utility and budget. Current methods have two limitations: (i) they either use heuristics that do not always enforce the budget constraint or impose a fixed per-query budget that cannot adapt across the workload and leads to suboptimal performance; (ii) they require supervised learning on a dense dataset with statistics for every query-model pair, which is expensive to collect. To address these challenges, we formulate LLM routing as a constrained contextual multi-armed bandit problem and introduce WISERouter (WR for short), a framework that supports offline learning from historical interactions as well as online learning with exploration. We further prove that WR-Online achieves a sublinear regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T})$ over a time horizon $T$. Empirical results on RouterBench and SWE-Bench demonstrate that (i) WR-Offline surpasses existing baselines in performance under a fixed budget and adheres more closely to budget constraints, and (ii) WR-Online achieves comparable performance to the baselines, while using substantially less exploration data.

Yifei Li, Zihui Gao, L. Lakshmanan · 0 citations
Book Open access Aug 2026

Dragonfly-Ultra: A Scalable, Low-Cost Network Architecture for High-Performance AI Clusters

Large-scale AI clusters impose higher requirements on network scalability, cost, and communication efficiency. The traditional Clos topology suffers from superlinear cost growth when scaling to over 100k GPUs, while the more cost-effective Dragonfly+ introduces "down-up" detours, deadlock risks, and complex routing design. This paper presents Dragonfly-Ultra, a scalable, low-cost network architecture for high-performance AI clusters. Dragonfly-Ultra can scale to over 260k GPUs with only 82% cost and 81% power consumption of a 3-layer Clos architecture. Dragonfly-Ultra optimizes inter-group connectivity to eliminate intra-group detours entirely. Beyond the topological benefits, Dragonfly-Ultra incorporates three key mechanisms to further improve network performance and optimize collective communication, including lightweight dual-waterline adaptive routing for fast congestion mitigation, virtual-link-based deadlock avoidance with lower hardware overhead, and uniform affinity-aware rank placement for balanced inter-group traffic across all phases. Simulation results on a 4k-node cluster show that, compared to Clos, Dragonfly-Ultra achieves up to 18.8% and 39.2% lower completion time for AllReduce and AlltoAll, respectively. Compared to Dragonfly+, the reductions are up to 27.9% and 62.1%, outperforming current mainstream topologies.

Rui Zhuang, Hui Yuan, Junye Zhang et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

Scalable Graph Coreset Selection via Greedy Sampling

This work proposes a simple and effective column-selective graph sampling algorithm based on a minimum inner product greedy selection rule, well-suited for large-scale graphs where the full Laplacian cannot be stored in memory.

Zhaiming Shen, Alexander Cloninger · 0 citations