4,168 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
Parallel Balanced Allocations: The Heavily Loaded Case
We study parallel algorithms for the classical balls-into-bins problem, in
which balls acting in parallel as separate agents are placed into bins.
Algorithms operate in synchronous rounds, in each of which balls and bins
exchange messages once. The goal is to minimize the maximal load over all bins
using a small number of rounds and few messages.
While the case of balls has been extensively studied, little is known
about the heavily loaded case. In this work, we consider parallel algorithms
for this somewhat neglected regime of . The naive solution of
allocating each ball to a bin chosen uniformly and independently at random
results in maximal load (for ) w.h.p. In contrast, for the sequential setting Berenbrink et al (SIAM J.
Comput 2006) showed that letting each ball join the least loaded bin of two
randomly selected bins reduces the maximal load to w.h.p.
To date, no parallel variant of such a result is known.
We present a simple parallel threshold algorithm that obtains a maximal load
of w.h.p. within rounds. The algorithm
is symmetric (balls and bins all "look the same"), and balls send
messages in expectation per round. The additive term of in the
complexity is known to be tight for such algorithms (Lenzen and Wattenhofer
Distributed Computing 2016). We also prove that our analysis is tight, i.e.,
algorithms of the type we provide must run for rounds w.h.p.
Finally, we give a simple asymmetric algorithm (i.e., balls are aware of a
common labeling of the bins) that achieves a maximal load of in a
constant number of rounds w.h.p. Again, balls send only a single message per
round, and bins receive messages w.h.p
Parallel Load Balancing on Constrained Client-Server Topologies
We study parallel \emph{Load Balancing} protocols for a client-server
distributed model defined as follows.
There is a set \sC of clients and a set \sS of servers where each
client has
(at most) a constant number of requests that must be assigned to
some server. The client set and the server one are connected to each other via
a fixed bipartite graph: the requests of client can only be sent to the
servers in its neighborhood . The goal is to assign every client request
so as to minimize the maximum load of the servers.
In this setting, efficient parallel protocols are available only for dense
topolgies. In particular, a simple symmetric, non-adaptive protocol achieving
constant maximum load has been recently introduced by Becchetti et al
\cite{BCNPT18} for regular dense bipartite graphs. The parallel completion time
is \bigO(\log n) and the overall work is \bigO(n), w.h.p.
Motivated by proximity constraints arising in some client-server systems, we
devise a simple variant of Becchetti et al's protocol \cite{BCNPT18} and we
analyse it over almost-regular bipartite graphs where nodes may have
neighborhoods of small size. In detail, we prove that, w.h.p., this new version
has a cost equivalent to that of Becchetti et al's protocol (in terms of
maximum load, completion time, and work complexity, respectively) on every
almost-regular bipartite graph with degree .
Our analysis significantly departs from that in \cite{BCNPT18} for the
original protocol and requires to cope with non-trivial stochastic-dependence
issues on the random choices of the algorithmic process which are due to the
worst-case, sparse topology of the underlying graph
High speed all optical networks
An inherent problem of conventional point-to-point wide area network (WAN) architectures is that they cannot translate optical transmission bandwidth into comparable user available throughput due to the limiting electronic processing speed of the switching nodes. The first solution to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based WAN networks that overcomes this limitation is presented. The proposed Lightnet architecture takes into account the idiosyncrasies of WDM switching/transmission leading to an efficient and pragmatic solution. The Lightnet architecture trades the ample WDM bandwidth for a reduction in the number of processing stages and a simplification of each switching stage, leading to drastically increased effective network throughputs. The principle of the Lightnet architecture is the construction and use of virtual topology networks, embedded in the original network in the wavelength domain. For this construction Lightnets utilize the new concept of lightpaths which constitute the links of the virtual topology. Lightpaths are all-optical, multihop, paths in the network that allow data to be switched through intermediate nodes using high throughput passive optical switches. The use of the virtual topologies and the associated switching design introduce a number of new ideas, which are discussed in detail
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