3,696 research outputs found
Store-Forward and its implications for Proportional Scheduling
The Proportional Scheduler was recently proposed as a scheduling algorithm
for multi-hop switch networks. For these networks, the BackPressure scheduler
is the classical benchmark. For networks with fixed routing, the Proportional
Scheduler is maximum stable, myopic and, furthermore, will alleviate certain
scaling issued found in BackPressure for large networks. Nonetheless, the
equilibrium and delay properties of the Proportional Scheduler has not been
fully characterized.
In this article, we postulate on the equilibrium behaviour of the
Proportional Scheduler though the analysis of an analogous rule called the
Store-Forward allocation. It has been shown that Store-Forward has
asymptotically allocates according to the Proportional Scheduler. Further, for
Store-Forward networks, numerous equilibrium quantities are explicitly
calculable. For FIFO networks under Store-Forward, we calculate the policies
stationary distribution and end-to-end route delay. We discuss network
topologies when the stationary distribution is product-form, a phenomenon which
we call \emph{product form resource pooling}. We extend this product form
notion to independent set scheduling on perfect graphs, where we show that
non-neighbouring queues are statistically independent. Finally, we analyse the
large deviations behaviour of the equilibrium distribution of Store-Forward
networks in order to construct Lyapunov functions for FIFO switch networks
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
ATP: a Datacenter Approximate Transmission Protocol
Many datacenter applications such as machine learning and streaming systems
do not need the complete set of data to perform their computation. Current
approximate applications in datacenters run on a reliable network layer like
TCP. To improve performance, they either let sender select a subset of data and
transmit them to the receiver or transmit all the data and let receiver drop
some of them. These approaches are network oblivious and unnecessarily transmit
more data, affecting both application runtime and network bandwidth usage. On
the other hand, running approximate application on a lossy network with UDP
cannot guarantee the accuracy of application computation. We propose to run
approximate applications on a lossy network and to allow packet loss in a
controlled manner. Specifically, we designed a new network protocol called
Approximate Transmission Protocol, or ATP, for datacenter approximate
applications. ATP opportunistically exploits available network bandwidth as
much as possible, while performing a loss-based rate control algorithm to avoid
bandwidth waste and re-transmission. It also ensures bandwidth fair sharing
across flows and improves accurate applications' performance by leaving more
switch buffer space to accurate flows. We evaluated ATP with both simulation
and real implementation using two macro-benchmarks and two real applications,
Apache Kafka and Flink. Our evaluation results show that ATP reduces
application runtime by 13.9% to 74.6% compared to a TCP-based solution that
drops packets at sender, and it improves accuracy by up to 94.0% compared to
UDP
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