Presenter: Mohammad Alizadeh,
Co-authors: Shuang Yang, Milad Sharif, Sachin Katti, Nick McKeown, Balaji Prabhakar, and Scott Shenker
This paper purposes pFabric, which aims to minimize average flow completion times in data centers. pFabric achieves this by approximating SRPT scheduling in a distributed manner. With pFabric switches employ small buffers and use priority scheduling and priority dropping based on priorities in packet headers that are assigned by end-hosts. pFabric end-hosts always send at line rate except under high packet loss rate, in which case they reduce the window size and apply slow start. In pFabric, losses are only recovered with timeouts through the use of a fixed, small RTO.
This work falls in the category of protocols which aim to approximate different scheduling algorithms (e.g., SRPT, EDF). Prior works include D3 (SIGCOMM'11), PDQ (SIGCOMM'12), D2TCP (SIGCOMM'12) and L2DCT (INFOCOM'13). Protocols like D3 and PDQ introduce complexity inside the network, whereas pFabric aims to reduce this complexity. Moreover D3 and PDQ require 1RTT to obtain rate feedback before sending traffic, pFabric aims to overcome this by allowing senders to transmit at the interface line rate in the first RTT.
The evaluation was done using ns-2 simulations. They evaluate pFabric's performance across a range of scenarios using empirically derived traffic distribution and show that pFabric achieves close to ideal mean flow completion times
==========================Q/A====================================
Q: Your evaluation focuses on non-over subscribed data center topology, how would the performance change under over-subscribed topologies? And how sensitive are your results to the use of packet spraying?
A: We conduced experiments under over-subscribed topologies (the results are in the technical report cited in the paper) and we found the performance to be similar.
We compared packet-spraying with ECMP, and found that packet spraying improved performance.
Q: How do you deal with scenarios with real time traffic like VOIP, for which flow completion time is not a meaningful metric?
A: Our work does not deal with such applications.
Q: How would you deal with jumbo frames in the short buffers you use?
A: We use 1500 byte packets, which provides us with about 20 packets of buffer. With jumbo frames, we need to have more buffering, however the performance is unlikely to be significantly impacted due to the use of priority scheduling and dropping.
Q: What happens to fairness? Do you care about fairness?
A: We do not care much about the fairness, however you could achieve improved fairness at the cost of increase in completion times.
Q: How does pFabric deal with a group of flows?
A: We do not deal with such scenarios. We specifically deal with scenarios of short and long flows.
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