The researchers say their PortLand software will enable Layer 2 data center network fabrics scalable to 100,000 ports and beyond, and they even have a prototype running at the school’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Their breakthrough is outlined in paper titled “” that is being presented at the SIGCOMM 2009 event in Barcelona this week.

"With PortLand, we came up with a set of algorithms and protocols that combine the best of layer 2 and layer 3 network fabrics," said Amin Vahdat, senior author of the paper and a computer science professor at UC San Diego, in a . "Today, the largest data centers contain over 100,000 servers. Ideally, we would like to have the flexibility to run any application on any server while minimizing the amount of required network configuration and state."

The data center has been a among leading vendors such as Cisco, HP, Juniper and IBM, some of which are retrofitting existing offerings and others of which are building products from scratch.