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We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago. Three themes unify the five generations of datacenter networks detailed in this paper. First, multi-stage Clos topologies built from commodity switch silicon can support cost-effective deployment of buildingscale networks. Second, much of the general, but complex, decentralized network routing and management protocols supporting arbitrary deployment scenarios were overkill for single-operator, pre-planned datacenter networks. We built a centralized control mechanism based on a global configuration pushed to all datacenter switches. Third, modular hardware design coupled with simple, robust software allowed our design to also support inter-cluster and wide-area networks. Our datacenter networks run at dozens of sites across the planet, scaling in capacity by 100x over 10 years to more than 1 Pbps of bisection bandwidth. A more detailed version of this paper is available at Ref. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at issues in the history of computing and computer science. The author assesses computer scientist Donald Knuth's criticisms of historiographic trends in the history of computer science, particularly as described by computer scientist Martin Campbell-Kelly in a 2007 paper entitled "The History of the History of Software." Topics include computer scientists versus historians as researchers on the history of computing.