531 research outputs found
Reproducible Host Networking Evaluation with End-to-End Simulation
Networking researchers are facing growing challenges in evaluating and
reproducing results for modern network systems. As systems rely on closer
integration of system components and cross-layer optimizations in the pursuit
of performance and efficiency, they are also increasingly tied to specific
hardware and testbed properties. Combined with a trend towards heterogeneous
hardware, such as protocol offloads, SmartNICs, and in-network accelerators,
researchers face the choice of either investing more and more time and
resources into comparisons to prior work or, alternatively, lower the standards
for evaluation.
We aim to address this challenge by introducing SimBricks, a simulation
framework that decouples networked systems from the physical testbed and
enables reproducible end-to-end evaluation in simulation. Instead of
reinventing the wheel, SimBricks is a modular framework for combining existing
tried-and-true simulators for individual components, processor and memory, NIC,
and network, into complete testbeds capable of running unmodified systems. In
our evaluation, we reproduce key findings from prior work, including dctcp
congestion control, NOPaxos in-network consensus acceleration, and the Corundum
FPGA NIC.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, under submissio
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
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