Soudeh Ghorbani, a PhD student at UIUC working with Brighten Godfrey, is visiting Princeton on November 13 to give a talk. Please see details of her talk below. What: Micro Load Balancing in Data Centers with DRILL When: Friday November 13 from 11am-11.30am Where: COS 302 Speaker: Soudeh Ghorbani, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ~~~~~ Micro Load Balancing in Data Centers with DRILL The trend towards simple data center network fabric strips most network functionality, including load balancing capabilities, out of the network core and pushes them to the edge. We investigate a different direction of incorporating minimal load balancing intelligence into the network fabric and show that this slightly smarter fabric significantly enhances performance. We provide a very simple in-network load balancing scheduling algorithm called DRILL which is purely local to each switch. DRILL leverages local load sensing and randomization concepts to distribute load among multiple paths. Through simulation, we show that this simple approach outperforms CONGA, a recent global edge-based load balancing scheme for data centers. We also formally prove the switch-level stability and throughput-efficiency of DRILL’s scheduling algorithm. ~~~~~ Srinivas