Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
TCP Vegas: new techniques for congestion detection and avoidance
SIGCOMM '94 Proceedings of the conference on Communications architectures, protocols and applications
IPPS '95 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Parallel Processing
Effects of clock resolution on the scheduling of interactive and soft real-time processes
SIGMETRICS '03 Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Why flow-completion time is the right metric for congestion control
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters
OSDI'04 Proceedings of the 6th conference on Symposium on Opearting Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 6
Trace-driven co-simulation of high-performance computing systems using OMNeT++
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques
Safe and effective fine-grained TCP retransmissions for datacenter communication
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
Understanding data center traffic characteristics
Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Research on enterprise networking
Understanding TCP incast throughput collapse in datacenter networks
Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Research on enterprise networking
The nature of data center traffic: measurements & analysis
Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Delay-based cloud congestion control
GLOBECOM'09 Proceedings of the 28th IEEE conference on Global telecommunications
Network traffic characteristics of data centers in the wild
IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
AF-QCN: Approximate Fairness with Quantized Congestion Notification for Multi-tenanted Data Centers
HOTI '10 Proceedings of the 2010 18th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects
Performance of Quantized Congestion Notification in TCP Incast Scenarios of Data Centers
MASCOTS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems
Short and Fat: TCP Performance in CEE Datacenter Networks
HOTI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 19th Annual Symposium on High Performance Interconnects
Channel reservation protocol for over-subscribed channels and destinations
SC '13 Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
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A key feature of the upcoming datacenter networks is their losslessness, achieved by the means of Priority Flow Control (PFC). Inherited from the cluster and HPC networks that traditionally use link level flow control to prevent packet loss across multiple virtual lanes, channels and/or priorities, this feature is now also becoming widely available in the next generation 10, 40 and 100Gbps Ethernet switches and adapters. Nevertheless, excepting storage protocols such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet, PFC is new and unfamiliar to the majority of datacenter applications and protocols. That is, despite PFC's key role in the datacenter and its increasing availability -- supported by virtually all future Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) products -- its impact on the higher layer routing and transport protocols has yet to be investigated. Hence our motivation to assess the performance exposure of three widespread TCP versions to PFC, as well as to the potentially conflicting Quantized Congestion Notification (QCN) congestion management mechanism, which apparently replicates on Layer 2 some more advanced TCP functionality. As workloads of interest we have selected a few revealing commercial and scientific applications. For quantitative performance evaluation we use two distinct methodologies: (a) Our reference is an accurate Layer 2 CEE 10Gbps network simulator intercoupled with TCP implementations extracted from FreeBSD v9; (b) A hardware setup scaled down in speed and size. The main outcome of our work is that PFC can notably improve the TCP performance across all tested configurations and workloads. This result was validated in both environments. Hence our recommendation to enable PFC whenever this is possible. By contrast, QCN can either harm or help depending on its parameter settings, and essentially, on the co-existence of competing UDP or other non-congestion-managed traffic.