pFabric: Minimal Near-Optimal Datacenter Transport

TitlepFabric: Minimal Near-Optimal Datacenter Transport
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsAlizadeh, M., Yang S., Sharif M., Katti S., McKeown N., Prabhakar B., & Shenker S. J.
Page(s)435-446
Other Numbers3432
Abstract

In this paper we present pFabric, a minimalistic datacenter transportdesign that provides near theoretically optimal flow completiontimes even at the 99th percentile for short flows, while stillminimizing average flow completion time for long flows. Moreover,pFabric delivers this performance with a very simple designthat is based on a key conceptual insight: datacenter transport shoulddecouple flow scheduling from rate control. For flow scheduling,packets carry a single priority number set independently by eachflow; switches have very small buffers and implement a very simplepriority-based scheduling/dropping mechanism. Rate control isalso correspondingly simpler; flows start at line rate and throttleback only under high and persistent packet loss. We provide theoreticalintuition and show via extensive simulations that the combinationof these two simple mechanisms is sufficient to providenear-optimal performance.

URLhttp://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/pfabric13.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM 2013), pp. 435-446, Hong Kong, China

Abbreviated Authors

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

ICSI Research Group

Networking and Security

ICSI Publication Type

Article in conference proceedings