INARouting: Efficient Multi-Job Routing Optimization for Hierarchical In-Network Aggregation

In-network aggregation (INA) has emerged as a key technology to alleviate communication bottlenecks in large-scale distributed training, but its performance is often hindered by suboptimal routing. Existing INA-aware routing algorithms suffer from certain limitations: they either lack a global, multi-job coordination mechanism, or operate on incomplete network models that ignore key hardware constraints such as switch processing capacity. These deficiencies lead to network congestion and inefficient resource utilization, ultimately undermining the full potential of INA. To address these challenges, we present INARouting, a novel framework that holistically solves the multi-job hierarchical aggregation routing problem. We propose TINA, a hierarchical aggregation protocol that supports multi-job in-network aggregation. To address different deployment scenarios, we develop two variants: INARouting-Opt that provides optimal solutions for moderate-scale networks, and INARouting-Relax, a fast and effective heuristic using LP-relaxation and a greedy score-based rounding algorithm for large-scale deployments. Through extensive experiments on various scales of Fat-Tree and Spine-Leaf topologies, we demonstrate that INARouting significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. INARouting- Opt achieves provably optimal solutions, reducing average job completion time by up to 56% compared to existing methods. Meanwhile, INARouting-Relax outperforms existing algorithms while being 5× faster in solving time, enabling efficient routing in large-scale, dynamic environments.