1. Fat-Tree In 1985, Charles E. Leiserson of MIT invented the Fat-Tree network. As shown in the figure below, a fat-tree network is a binary tree in which bandwidth gradually increases from the root nodes down to the leaf nodes. In August 2008, a group of computer scientists at UC San Diego published a scalable network architecture design that adopted a topology inspired by the fat-tree topology, achieving better scalability than previous hierarchical networks.