Speaker: Kyriakos Zarifis, University of Southern California (USC) Title: Don't Drop, Detour! Date/time: 2-2.30pm, Thursday July 25 Location: 402 in the CS building Abstract: Today's data centers must support a range of workloads with different demands. While existing approaches handle routine traffic smoothly, ephemeral but intense hotspots cause excessive packet loss and severely degrade performance. This loss occurs even though the congestion is typically highly localized, with spare buffer capacity available at nearby switches. In this talk, we argue that switches should share buffer capacity to effectively handle this spot congestion without the latency or monetary hit of deploying large buffers at individual switches. Specifically, we present DIBS, a mechanism that achieves a near lossless network without requiring additional buffers. Using DIBS, a congested switch detours excess packets to neighboring switches to avoid dropping them. We implement DIBS in hardware, on software routers in a testbed, and in simulation, and we demonstrate that it reduces the 99th percentile of query completion time by 85%, with very little impact on background traffic. Speaker bio (from his webpage): Kyriakos Zarifis is a 1st year PhD student in the Networked Systems Lab at the University of Southern California. Previously he worked as a networking researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, where he also dedicated part of his time maintaining NOX. He holds an M.Sc. in Internetworking from Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan and a Ptychion (B.Sc.) from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens.