Architecture Design and Management for Data Center Networks

Speaker:        Kai CHEN
                Northwestern University
                USA

Title:          "Architecture Design and Management for Data Center
                Networks"

Date:           Monday, 19 March 2012

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Driven by technology advances and economic forces, data centers are being
built around the world to support various infrastructure services (e.g.,
GFS, Map-reduce and Dryad) and Internet/cloud applications (e.g., web
search, e-commerce, social networking). How to design a sustainable data
center network architecture and how to manage it are two fundamental
challenges for data center research, and form the basis of my PhD thesis
work.

In this talk, I will focus on introducing two coupled systems called OSA
and DAC. Specifically, OSA is a novel optical switching architecture for
data center networks. At its core, by exploiting runtime reconfigurable
optical devices, OSA flexibly adapts its topology and link capacities to
various traffic patterns and thus achieves high network bisection
bandwidth. The key idea I hope to deliver via OSA is that: a thin but
flexible architecture, instead of a static fat one, can better support
data center networking in a simple, cost-effective and sustainable way. On
the other hand, DAC is a management system that performs address
autoconfiguration for OSA and other generic data center networks. DAC is
motivated by the key observation that data center networks encode locality
and topology information into their server/switch addresses for
performance and routing purposes which makes the traditional address
autoconfiguration protocols, like DHCP, not applicable any more in the new
data center environment. The core of DAC is to reduce the address
autoconfiguration problem to the graph isomorphism (GI) problem and solve
it efficiently by leveraging the data center topology properties. In both
designs, we have evaluated and validated our systems via extensive
analysis, simulations and prototype implementations. During the talk, I
will summarize the other research in my PhD study and foresee the future
plans at the end.


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Biography:

Kai Chen is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the EECS Department at
Northwestern University. Prior to this, he received his B.S. and M.S.
degrees in Computer Science in 2004 and 2007 respectively, both from
University of Science and Technology of China. His research interests
include networks and networked systems, with emphasis on data centre
networks, resource management for cloud computing, Internet measurement
and routing. He has actively collaborated with the industry such as
Microsoft, AT&T, and NEC Labs. He is interested in finding simple yet deep
and elegant solutions to practical challenging problems that generate
real-world impact.