244 research outputs found
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
No Provisioned Concurrency: Fast RDMA-codesigned Remote Fork for Serverless Computing
Serverless platforms essentially face a tradeoff between container startup
time and provisioned concurrency (i.e., cached instances), which is further
exaggerated by the frequent need for remote container initialization. This
paper presents MITOSIS, an operating system primitive that provides fast remote
fork, which exploits a deep codesign of the OS kernel with RDMA. By leveraging
the fast remote read capability of RDMA and partial state transfer across
serverless containers, MITOSIS bridges the performance gap between local and
remote container initialization. MITOSIS is the first to fork over 10,000 new
containers from one instance across multiple machines within a second, while
allowing the new containers to efficiently transfer the pre-materialized states
of the forked one. We have implemented MITOSIS on Linux and integrated it with
FN, a popular serverless platform. Under load spikes in real-world serverless
workloads, MITOSIS reduces the function tail latency by 89% with orders of
magnitude lower memory usage. For serverless workflow that requires state
transfer, MITOSIS improves its execution time by 86%.Comment: To appear in OSDI'2
Scalable and Reliable Middlebox Deployment
Middleboxes are pervasive in modern computer networks providing functionalities beyond mere packet forwarding. Load balancers, intrusion detection systems, and network address translators are typical examples of middleboxes. Despite their benefits, middleboxes come with several challenges with respect to their scalability and reliability.
The goal of this thesis is to devise middlebox deployment solutions that are cost effective, scalable, and fault tolerant. The thesis includes three main contributions: First, distributed service function chaining with multiple instances of a middlebox deployed on different physical servers to optimize resource usage; Second, Constellation, a geo-distributed middlebox framework enabling a middlebox application to operate with high performance across wide area networks; Third, a fault tolerant service function chaining system
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