Deconstructing Datacenter Packet Transport

TitleDeconstructing Datacenter Packet Transport
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2012
AuthorsAlizadeh, M., Yang S., Katti S., McKeown N., Prabhakar B., & Shenker S. J.
Page(s)133-138
Other Numbers3425
Abstract

We present, pFabric, a minimalistic datacenter fabricdesign that provides near-optimal performance in termsof completion time for high-priority flows and overallnetwork utilization. pFabric’s design eliminates nearlyall buffering on switches (switches have only 20KB ofbuffering per port), requires almost no congestion con-trol and uses only simple mechanisms at each switch.Specifically, switches are only required to locally andgreedily decide what packets to schedule and drop ac-cording to priorities in the packet header and do notmaintain any flow state or rate estimates. Rate-controlis almost unnecessary, all flows start at line-rate andonly slow down in the extreme case of congestion col-lapse. We show via simulations using realistic workloadsand topologies that this simple design achieves near op-timal flow completion times and network utilization.

URLhttps://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/ICSI_deconstructingdatacenterpacket12.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets XI), Redmond, Washington, pp. 133-138

Abbreviated Authors

M. Alizadeh, S. Yang, S. Katti, N. McKeown, B. Prabhakar, and S. Shenker

ICSI Research Group

Networking and Security

ICSI Publication Type

Article in conference proceedings