[hazz99]

Unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations to give, my experience starts and stops at application development. Though I would love to spend some time in a datacenter!

Potentially have a look at Infiniband and Clos/fat tree networks?

My more generic recommendation would be to explore semantic scholar for impactful/cited papers, look for some meta analyses, and just dig through multiple layers of references till you hit the fundamentals (typically things published in the 80s for a lot of CS topics).