Fat tree

[citation needed] Mesh and hypercube topologies have communication requirements that follow a rigid algorithm, and cannot be tailored to specific packaging technologies.

[citation needed] Mercury Computer Systems applied a variant of the fat tree topology—the hypertree network—to their multicomputers.

[citation needed] In this architecture, 2 to 360 compute nodes are arranged in a circuit-switched fat tree network.

[vague] Each node in this heterogeneous system could be an Intel i860, a PowerPC, or a group of three SHARC digital signal processors.

[citation needed] The fat tree network was particularly well suited to fast Fourier transform computations, which customers used for such signal processing tasks as radar, sonar, and medical imaging.