Publication Details
Title: Deconstructing Datacenter Packet Transport
Author: M. Alizadeh, S. Yang, S. Katti, N. McKeown, B. Prabhakar, and S. Shenker
Bibliographic Information: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets XI), Redmond, Washington, pp. 133-138
Date: October 2012
Research Area: Networking and Security
Type: Article in conference proceedings
PDF: https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/ICSI_deconstructingdatacenterpacket12.pdf
Overview:
We present, pFabric, a minimalistic datacenter fabric design that provides near-optimal performance in terms of completion time for high-priority flows and overall network utilization. pFabric’s design eliminates nearly all buffering on switches (switches have only 20KB of buffering per port), requires almost no congestion con- trol and uses only simple mechanisms at each switch. Specifically, switches are only required to locally and greedily decide what packets to schedule and drop ac- cording to priorities in the packet header and do not maintain any flow state or rate estimates. Rate-control is almost unnecessary, all flows start at line-rate and only slow down in the extreme case of congestion col- lapse. We show via simulations using realistic workloads and topologies that this simple design achieves near op- timal flow completion times and network utilization.
Bibliographic Reference:
M. Alizadeh, S. Yang, S. Katti, N. McKeown, B. Prabhakar, and S. Shenker. Deconstructing Datacenter Packet Transport. Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets XI), Redmond, Washington, pp. 133-138, October 2012
Author: M. Alizadeh, S. Yang, S. Katti, N. McKeown, B. Prabhakar, and S. Shenker
Bibliographic Information: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets XI), Redmond, Washington, pp. 133-138
Date: October 2012
Research Area: Networking and Security
Type: Article in conference proceedings
PDF: https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/ICSI_deconstructingdatacenterpacket12.pdf
Overview:
We present, pFabric, a minimalistic datacenter fabric design that provides near-optimal performance in terms of completion time for high-priority flows and overall network utilization. pFabric’s design eliminates nearly all buffering on switches (switches have only 20KB of buffering per port), requires almost no congestion con- trol and uses only simple mechanisms at each switch. Specifically, switches are only required to locally and greedily decide what packets to schedule and drop ac- cording to priorities in the packet header and do not maintain any flow state or rate estimates. Rate-control is almost unnecessary, all flows start at line-rate and only slow down in the extreme case of congestion col- lapse. We show via simulations using realistic workloads and topologies that this simple design achieves near op- timal flow completion times and network utilization.
Bibliographic Reference:
M. Alizadeh, S. Yang, S. Katti, N. McKeown, B. Prabhakar, and S. Shenker. Deconstructing Datacenter Packet Transport. Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets XI), Redmond, Washington, pp. 133-138, October 2012