Packet Transactions: High-level Programming for Line-Rate Switches

Many algorithms for congestion control, scheduling, network measurement, active queue management, security, and load balancing require custom processing of packets as they traverse the data plane of a network switch. To run at line rate, these data-plane algorithms must be in hardware. With today's switch hardware, algorithms cannot be changed, nor new algorithms installed, after a switch has been built. This paper shows how to program data-plane algorithms in a high-level language and compile those programs into low-level microcode that can run on emerging programmable line-rate switching chipsets. The key challenge is that these algorithms create and modify algorithmic state. The key idea to achieve line-rate programmability for stateful algorithms is the notion of a packet transaction : a sequential code block that is atomic and isolated from other such code blocks. We have developed this idea in Domino, a C-like imperative language to express data-plane algorithms. We show with many examples that Domino provides a convenient and natural way to express sophisticated data-plane algorithms, and show that these algorithms can be run at line rate with modest estimated die-area overhead.Comment: 16 page

On the Conditions that Justify Dynamic Reconfigurability in WDM-TDMA Optical Access Networks

[EN] In a passive optical network with a hybrid wavelength division multiplexing time division multiple-access scheme, implementing reconfigurable wavelength assignment is complex; hence the need to determine the conditions for which the capacity improvements justify requiring reconfigurability over adopting a more inexpensive fixed wavelength assignment. Fixed and reconfigurable approaches to wavelength assignment are modeled and evaluated under nonstationary traffic conditions. The performance improvement is obtained in terms of bit rate gain relative to the nominal bandwidth and depends on the number of wavelength channels as well as the magnitude of the load offered by the optical network units. In addition, frame delay and frame loss in relation to the bit rate performance are obtained for Pareto and exponentially distributed traffic. Simulations show that when introducing reconfigurability, typical peak bit rate gains with respect to the fixed case are 17%, and maxima of 175% are potentially possible when traffic demands are particularly uneven.This work was supported by the EC 7th Framework Program: Architectures for fLexible Photonic Home and Access networks (ALPHA), under contract ICT CP-IP 212 352, from the Generalitat of Valencia under contract ACOMP/2010/196. The authors thank the Performability Engineering Research Group (PERFORM) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for developing the software tool Mobius.García Roger, D.; Artundo Martínez, I.; Ortega Tamarit, B. (2011). On the Conditions that Justify Dynamic Reconfigurability in WDM-TDMA Optical Access Networks. Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. 3(4):259-271. https://doi.org/10.1364/JOCN.3.000259S25927134A highly flexible and efficient passive optical network employing dynamic wavelength allocation. (2005). Journal of Lightwave Technology, 23(1), 277-286. doi:10.1109/jlt.2004.838811Maier, M., Herzog, M., & Reisslein, M. (2007). STARGATE: the next evolutionary step toward unleashing the potential of WDM EPONs [Topics in Optical Communications]. IEEE Communications Magazine, 45(5), 50-56. doi:10.1109/mcom.2007.358848Urban, P. J., Huiszoon, B., Roy, R., de Laat, M. M., Huijskens, F. M., Klein, E. J., … de Waardt, H. (2009). High-Bit-Rate Dynamically Reconfigurable WDM–TDM Access Network. Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 1(2), A143. doi:10.1364/jocn.1.00a143Glatty, R., Guignard, P., & Chanclou, P. (2009). Fair Resource Distribution Within the Flexible WDMA/TDMA Optical Access Network Based on GPON Infrastructure. Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 1(2), A17. doi:10.1364/jocn.1.000a17Roy, R., Manhoudt, G., & van Etten, W. (2008). Optical-router-based dynamically reconfigurable photonic access network. 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A comparison of dynamic bandwidth allocation for EPON, GPON, and next-generation TDM PON. IEEE Communications Magazine, 47(3), S40-S48. doi:10.1109/mcom.2009.4804388Papadimitriou, G. I., & Pomportsis, A. S. (1999). Self-adaptive TDMA protocols for WDM star networks: a learning-automata-based approach. IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, 11(10), 1322-1324. doi:10.1109/68.789731Linardakis, C., Leligou, H. C., Stavdas, A., & Angelopoulos, J. D. (2005). Using explicit reservations to arbitrate access to a metropolitan system of slotted interconnected rings combining TDMA and WDMA. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 23(4), 1576-1585. doi:10.1109/jlt.2005.844198Kanonakis, K., & Tomkos, I. (2010). Improving the efficiency of online upstream scheduling and wavelength assignment in hybrid WDM/TDMA EPON networks. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 28(6), 838-848. doi:10.1109/jsac.2010.100809McGarry, M. P., Reisslein, M., & Maier, M. (2006). WDM Ethernet passive optical networks. 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Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Exploration and Design of Power-Efficient Networked Many-Core Systems

Multiprocessing is a promising solution to meet the requirements of near future applications. To get full benefit from parallel processing, a manycore system needs efficient, on-chip communication architecture. Networkon- Chip (NoC) is a general purpose communication concept that offers highthroughput, reduced power consumption, and keeps complexity in check by a regular composition of basic building blocks. This thesis presents power efficient communication approaches for networked many-core systems. We address a range of issues being important for designing power-efficient manycore systems at two different levels: the network-level and the router-level. From the network-level point of view, exploiting state-of-the-art concepts such as Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS), Voltage/ Frequency Island (VFI), and 3D Networks-on-Chip approaches may be a solution to the excessive power consumption demanded by today’s and future many-core systems. To this end, a low-cost 3D NoC architecture, based on high-speed GALS-based vertical channels, is proposed to mitigate high peak temperatures, power densities, and area footprints of vertical interconnects in 3D ICs. To further exploit the beneficial feature of a negligible inter-layer distance of 3D ICs, we propose a novel hybridization scheme for inter-layer communication. In addition, an efficient adaptive routing algorithm is presented which enables congestion-aware and reliable communication for the hybridized NoC architecture. An integrated monitoring and management platform on top of this architecture is also developed in order to implement more scalable power optimization techniques. From the router-level perspective, four design styles for implementing power-efficient reconfigurable interfaces in VFI-based NoC systems are proposed. To enhance the utilization of virtual channel buffers and to manage their power consumption, a partial virtual channel sharing method for NoC routers is devised and implemented. Extensive experiments with synthetic and real benchmarks show significant power savings and mitigated hotspots with similar performance compared to latest NoC architectures. The thesis concludes that careful codesigned elements from different network levels enable considerable power savings for many-core systems.Siirretty Doriast