[talks] 2pm Thu Jul 25 data center networking talk by Kyriakos Zarifis (USC) in CS 402

[Srinivas Narayana]

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.