884 research outputs found
FatPaths: Routing in Supercomputers and Data Centers when Shortest Paths Fall Short
We introduce FatPaths: a simple, generic, and robust routing architecture
that enables state-of-the-art low-diameter topologies such as Slim Fly to
achieve unprecedented performance. FatPaths targets Ethernet stacks in both HPC
supercomputers as well as cloud data centers and clusters. FatPaths exposes and
exploits the rich ("fat") diversity of both minimal and non-minimal paths for
high-performance multi-pathing. Moreover, FatPaths uses a redesigned "purified"
transport layer that removes virtually all TCP performance issues (e.g., the
slow start), and incorporates flowlet switching, a technique used to prevent
packet reordering in TCP networks, to enable very simple and effective load
balancing. Our design enables recent low-diameter topologies to outperform
powerful Clos designs, achieving 15% higher net throughput at 2x lower latency
for comparable cost. FatPaths will significantly accelerate Ethernet clusters
that form more than 50% of the Top500 list and it may become a standard routing
scheme for modern topologies
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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