Extreme Data-rate Scheduling for the Data Center

Designing scalable and cost-effective data center interconnect architectures based on electrical packet switches is challenging. To overcome this challenge, researchers have tried to harness the advantages of optics in data center environment. This has resulted in exploration of hybrid switching architectures that contains an optical circuit switch to serve long bursts of traffic along with an electrical packet switch serving short bursts of traffic. The performance of such hybrid switching architectures in data center is dependent on the schedulers. Building hybrid schedulers is challenging because of varying properties of data center traffic, increasing network demands, requirements imposed by hybrid network architecture etc. Slow schedulers can negatively impact the performance of the data center network because of poor resource utilization. With future demands, this problem is going to escalate motivating the need for faster schedulers. One approach to do this would be to use a hardware based scheduler. In this paper we propose a framework that can be used to explore and evaluate hardware based hybrid schedulers.This project is supported by the EPSRC INTERNET Project EP/H040536/1.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2785956.279001

Stardust: Divide and conquer in the data center network

Building scalable data centers, and network devices that fit within these data centers, becomes increasingly hard. With modern switches pushing at the boundary of manufacturing feasibility, being able to build simple, and scalable network fabrics is of utmost importance in data centers. We introduce Stardust: a scalable fabric architecture for data center networks, inspired by network-switch system and scaled up to data center scale. Stardust combines packet switches at the edge and disaggregated cell switches at the network fabric, using scheduled traffic. Stardust is a scalable, distributed solution, attending to the limitations of network-switch design, while offering improved performance and power savings compared with traditional solutions. With networking requirements ever increasing, Stardust predicts the elimination of packet switches, replaced by cell switches in the network, and smart network interface cards at the edges.Leverhulme Trust Isaac Newton Trus