XCo: explicit coordination to prevent network fabric congestion in cloud computing cluster platforms

Large cluster-based cloud computing platforms increasingly use commodity Ethernet technologies, such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10GigE, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), for intra-cluster communication. Traffic congestion can become a performance concern in the Ethernet due to consolidation of data, storage, and control traffic over a common layer-2 fabric, as well as consolidation of multiple virtual machines (VMs) over less physical hardware. Even as networking vendors race to develop switch-level hardware support for congestion management, we make the case that virtualization has opened up a complementary set of opportunities to reduce or even eliminate network congestion in cloud computing clusters. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system called XCo, that performs explicit coordination of network transmissions over a shared Ethernet fabric to proactively prevent network congestion. XCo is a software-only distributed solution executing only in the end-node...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Vijay Shankar Rajanna, Smit Shah 0002, Anand Jahagirdar, Christopher Lemoine, Kartik Gopalan
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Ethernet, HPDC 2010, Network Congestion, Switch-level Hardware Support