A scalable, commodity data center network architecture
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication
VL2: a scalable and flexible data center network
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
Hedera: dynamic flow scheduling for data center networks
NSDI'10 Proceedings of the 7th USENIX conference on Networked systems design and implementation
EyeQ: practical network performance isolation at the edge
nsdi'13 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Catch the whole lot in an action: rapid precise packet loss notification in data centers
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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Multi-rooted tree topologies are commonly used to construct high-bandwidth data center network fabrics. In these networks, switches typically rely on equal-cost multipath (ECMP) routing techniques to split traffic across multiple paths, such that packets within a flow traverse the same end-to-end path. Unfortunately, since ECMP splits traffic based on flow-granularity, it can cause load imbalance across paths resulting in poor utilization of network resources. More fine-grained traffic splitting techniques are typically not preferred because they can cause packet reordering that can, according to conventional wisdom, lead to severe TCP throughput degradation. In this work, we revisit this fact in the context of regular data center topologies such as fat-tree architectures. We argue that packet-level traffic splitting, where packets of a flow are sprayed through all available paths, would lead to a better load-balanced network, which in turn leads to significantly more balanced queues and much higher throughput compared to ECMP.