Routing over eXplicit Paths in Data Centers: Design and Applications

Speaker:        Dr. Kai CHEN
                Department of Computer Science and Engineering
                Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title:          "Routing over eXplicit Paths in Data Centers:
                 Design and Applications"

Date:           Monday, 5 May 2014

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

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

Abstract:

Emerging data center applications require explicit routing path control
over the underlying topologies. Most of them now leverage OpenFlow to
enforce such path provisioning. However, this approach falls short of
scalability because today's commodity switches only support a limited
number of forwarding rules (1-4K).

Motivated by this, we propose RoX, a simple yet novel idea of Routing over
eXplicit paths for data centers that preserves scalability. Our key
methodology is to harness cheap but much larger IP table (144K) in
commodity switches instead of expensive and scarce OpenFlow table to
implement explicit path control. At its very core, RoX builds on a simple
concept of path ID to express an end-to-end path, a bold idea of
pre-installing all desired paths between any source-destination pairs into
IP tables, and an effective algorithm of paths to routing entries
compression that translates the idea into practice. We evaluate RoX on
large DCNs to show its high scalability, and implement RoX with commodity
switches to show its readily deployment. We especially show that RoX
directly benefits 5 representative applications, for example, from
providing the necessary bandwidth for provisioned IOPS to reducing the
shuffle time of Map-reduce by over 300% over ECMP.


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Biography:

Kai Chen is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science
and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong
Kong. He received his PhD from Northwestern University, Evanston IL in
2012. His research interests include networked systems design and
analysis, data center networks, and cloud computing. He is interested in
finding simple yet deep and elegant solutions to real-world networking and
systems problems.