Abstract

We will present techniques developed in collaboration with the OSiRIS project (NSF Award #1541335, UM, IU, MSU and WSU) and SLATE (NSF Award #1724821) for orchestrating software defined network slices with a goal of building reproducible and reliable computer networks for large data collaborations. With this project we have explored methods of utilizing passive and active measurements to build a carefully curated model of the network. We will show that by then using such a model, we can dynamically and programmatically alter network and host configuration to effectively respond to changing network conditions. As part of our presentation, we will show how SLATE, operating over a slice of the Internet2 network, provides a container focused platform for running a Network Management Abstraction Layer (NMAL), allowing us to control applications in a reliable and reproducible way. This presentation will demonstrate how NMAL tracks live network topological and performance statistics on an Internet2 slice with SLATE-enabled hosts to enact traffic engineering and container placement decisions in order to optimize network behavior based on user defined profiles. We will conclude by discussing the future of this work and our plans for using it to support science activities in production. Document type: Article

Abstract

Datacenters provide the infrastructure for cloud computing services used by millions of users everyday. Many such services are distributed over multiple datacenters at geographically distant locations possibly in different continents. These datacenters are then connected through high speed WAN links over private or public networks. To perform data backups or data synchronization operations, many transfers take place over these networks that have to be completed before a deadline in order to provide necessary service guarantees to end users. Upon arrival of a transfer request, we would like the system to be able to decide whether such a request can be guaranteed successful delivery. If yes, it should provide us with transmission schedule in the shortest time possible. In addition, we would like to avoid packet reordering at the destination as it affects TCP performance. Previous work in this area either cannot guarantee that admitted transfers actually finish before the specified deadlines or use techniques that can result in packet reordering. In this paper, we propose DCRoute, a fast and efficient routing and traffic allocation technique that guarantees transfer completion before deadlines for admitted requests. It assigns each transfer a single path to avoid packet reordering. Through simulations, we show that DCRoute is at least 200 times faster than other traffic allocation techniques based on linear programming (LP) while admitting almost the same amount of traffic to the system. Comment: 23rd IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC) Document type: Conference object

Abstract

Using multiple datacenters allows for higher availability, load balancing and reduced latency to customers of cloud services. To distribute multiple copies of data, cloud providers depend on inter-datacenter WANs that ought to be used efficiently considering their limited capacity and the ever-increasing data demands. In this paper, we focus on applications that transfer objects from one datacenter to several datacenters over dedicated inter-datacenter networks. We present DCCast, a centralized Point to Multi-Point (P2MP) algorithm that uses forwarding trees to efficiently deliver an object from a source datacenter to required destination datacenters. With low computational overhead, DCCast selects forwarding trees that minimize bandwidth usage and balance load across all links. With simulation experiments on Google's GScale network, we show that DCCast can reduce total bandwidth usage and tail Transfer Completion Times (TCT) by up to $50\\%$ compared to delivering the same objects via independent point-to-point (P2P) transfers. Comment: 9th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/presentation/noormohammadpour Document type: Conference object