The theoretical upper limit of a network's capacity is its
liquid throughput (assuming there is no network coding). The
liquid throughput corresponds to the flow of a liquid in an
equivalent network of pipes. The aggregate throughput of an
arbitrarily scheduled collective communication may be several
times lower than the maximal potential throughput of the network
due to congestions between simultaneous transfers sharing a
common communication resource. This method relies on the
knowledge of the underlying network topology and ensures an
optimal utilization of all bottleneck links of the network. It
properly schedules the transmissions within a time as short as
the utilization time of a bottleneck link. This guarantees that
the liquid throughput is attained. Liquid scheduling can be
applied in high-performance computing (HPC) networks. It can be
also applied in optical networks, for example in optical burst
switching (OBS) where the edge IP routers perform liquid
scheduling in order to ensure an efficient uti