Hedera: dynamic flow scheduling for data center networks

  • Authors:

  • Mohammad Al-Fares;Sivasankar Radhakrishnan;Barath Raghavan;Nelson Huang;Amin Vahdat

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego;Department of Computer Science, Williams College;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'10 Proceedings of the 7th USENIX conference on Networked systems design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Today's data centers offer tremendous aggregate bandwidth to clusters of tens of thousands of machines. However, because of limited port densities in even the highest-end switches, data center topologies typically consist of multi-rooted trees with many equal-cost paths between any given pair of hosts. Existing IP multipathing protocols usually rely on per-flow static hashing and can cause substantial bandwidth losses due to long-term collisions. In this paper, we present Hedera, a scalable, dynamic flow scheduling system that adaptively schedules a multi-stage switching fabric to efficiently utilize aggregate network resources. We describe our implementation using commodity switches and unmodified hosts, and show that for a simulated 8,192 host data center, Hedera delivers bisection bandwidth that is 96% of optimal and up to 113% better than static load-balancing methods.