286 research outputs found
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
DCCast: Efficient Point to Multipoint Transfers Across Datacenters
Using multiple datacenters allows for higher availability, load balancing and
reduced latency to customers of cloud services. To distribute multiple copies
of data, cloud providers depend on inter-datacenter WANs that ought to be used
efficiently considering their limited capacity and the ever-increasing data
demands. In this paper, we focus on applications that transfer objects from one
datacenter to several datacenters over dedicated inter-datacenter networks. We
present DCCast, a centralized Point to Multi-Point (P2MP) algorithm that uses
forwarding trees to efficiently deliver an object from a source datacenter to
required destination datacenters. With low computational overhead, DCCast
selects forwarding trees that minimize bandwidth usage and balance load across
all links. With simulation experiments on Google's GScale network, we show that
DCCast can reduce total bandwidth usage and tail Transfer Completion Times
(TCT) by up to compared to delivering the same objects via independent
point-to-point (P2P) transfers.Comment: 9th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing,
https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/presentation/noormohammadpou
QuickCast: Fast and Efficient Inter-Datacenter Transfers using Forwarding Tree Cohorts
Large inter-datacenter transfers are crucial for cloud service efficiency and
are increasingly used by organizations that have dedicated wide area networks
between datacenters. A recent work uses multicast forwarding trees to reduce
the bandwidth needs and improve completion times of point-to-multipoint
transfers. Using a single forwarding tree per transfer, however, leads to poor
performance because the slowest receiver dictates the completion time for all
receivers. Using multiple forwarding trees per transfer alleviates this
concern--the average receiver could finish early; however, if done naively,
bandwidth usage would also increase and it is apriori unclear how best to
partition receivers, how to construct the multiple trees and how to determine
the rate and schedule of flows on these trees. This paper presents QuickCast, a
first solution to these problems. Using simulations on real-world network
topologies, we see that QuickCast can speed up the average receiver's
completion time by as much as while only using more
bandwidth; further, the completion time for all receivers also improves by as
much as faster at high loads.Comment: [Extended Version] Accepted for presentation in IEEE INFOCOM 2018,
Honolulu, H
Effective and Economical Content Delivery and Storage Strategies for Cloud Systems
Cloud computing has proved to be an effective infrastructure to host various applications and provide reliable and stable services. Content delivery and storage are two main services provided by the cloud. A high-performance cloud can reduce the cost of both cloud providers and customers, while providing high application performance to cloud clients. Thus, the performance of such cloud-based services is closely related to three issues. First, when delivering contents from the cloud to users or transferring contents between cloud datacenters, it is important to reduce the payment costs and transmission time. Second, when transferring contents between cloud datacenters, it is important to reduce the payment costs to the internet service providers (ISPs). Third, when storing contents in the datacenters, it is crucial to reduce the file read latency and power consumption of the datacenters. In this dissertation, we study how to effectively deliver and store contents on the cloud, with a focus on cloud gaming and video streaming services. In particular, we aim to address three problems. i) Cost-efficient cloud computing system to support thin-client Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG): how to achieve high Quality of Service (QoS) in cloud gaming and reduce the cloud bandwidth consumption; ii) Cost-efficient inter-datacenter video scheduling: how to reduce the bandwidth payment cost by fully utilizing link bandwidth when cloud providers transfer videos between datacenters; iii) Energy-efficient adaptive file replication: how to adapt to time-varying file popularities to achieve a good tradeoff between data availability and efficiency, as well as reduce the power consumption of the datacenters. In this dissertation, we propose methods to solve each of aforementioned challenges on the cloud. As a result, we build a cloud system that has a cost-efficient system to support cloud clients, an inter-datacenter video scheduling algorithm for video transmission on the cloud and an adaptive file replication algorithm for cloud storage system. As a result, the cloud system not only benefits the cloud providers in reducing the cloud cost, but also benefits the cloud customers in reducing their payment cost and improving high cloud application performance (i.e., user experience). Finally, we conducted extensive experiments on many testbeds, including PeerSim, PlanetLab, EC2 and a real-world cluster, which demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed methods. In our future work, we will further study how to further improve user experience in receiving contents and reduce the cost due to content transfer
CASPR: Judiciously Using the Cloud for Wide-Area Packet Recovery
We revisit a classic networking problem -- how to recover from lost packets
in the best-effort Internet. We propose CASPR, a system that judiciously
leverages the cloud to recover from lost or delayed packets. CASPR supplements
and protects best-effort connections by sending a small number of coded packets
along the highly reliable but expensive cloud paths. When receivers detect
packet loss, they recover packets with the help of the nearby data center, not
the sender, thus providing quick and reliable packet recovery for
latency-sensitive applications. Using a prototype implementation and its
deployment on the public cloud and the PlanetLab testbed, we quantify the
benefits of CASPR in providing fast, cost effective packet recovery. Using
controlled experiments, we also explore how these benefits translate into
improvements up and down the network stack
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