HPCwire: Computer Scientists Propose New Way to Build Datacenters

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August 20, 2008

Computer Scientists Propose New Way to Build Datacenters

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SAN DIEGO, Aug. 19 -- Computer scientists at the UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering have proposed a new way to build datacenters that could save companies money and deliver more computing capability to end-users.

"Large companies are putting together server farms of tens of thousands of computers -- even approaching 100-thousand, and the big challenge is to interconnect all these computers so that they can talk to each other as quickly as possible, without incurring significant costs," said Amin Vahdat, a professor of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. "We are proposing a new topology for Ethernet datacenter connectivity."

The innovation is outlined in a paper, titled "A Scalable, Commodity Data Center Network Architecture," presented today by Vahdat at the annual meeting of SIGCOMM, the Special Interest Group on Data Communications. SIGCOMM is the premier academic conference for researchers in the fields of communications and computer networks, and the event runs through Friday in Seattle, Washington.

Vahdat, who also directs UCSD's Center for Networked Systems (CNS), co-authored the paper with two CSE graduate students, Mohammad Al-Fares and Alexander Loukissas.

It was also announced this week that Vahdat is one of only 41 researchers worldwide to be awarded a newly-created Hewlett-Packard Labs Innovation Research Award. The award will allow Vahdat and his team to develop further their proposed new networking architecture outlined in their SIGCOMM paper.

The researchers' work addresses problems inherent to current datacenter networks found in scientific computing, financial analysis, social networking, or any industry with large-scale computation or storage needs. Explained Vahdat: "Our work addresses the problem of datacenter network connectivity in a world where consolidation is increasingly taking place in datacenters."

Typically, computers are connected by a network architecture that consists of a "tree" of routing and switching elements regulated by specialized equipment, with expensive, non-commodity switches at the top of the hierarchy. But even with the highest-end IP switches and routers, the networks can only support a small fraction of the combined bandwidth available to end hosts. This limits the overall cluster size, while still incurring considerable costs. Application design is further complicated by non-uniform bandwidth among datacenter nodes, which limits overall system performance.

The UC San Diego researchers' envision creating a datacenter that will have scalable interconnection bandwidth, making it possible for an arbitrary host in the datacenter to communicate with any other host in the network at the full bandwidth of its local network interface. Their approach requires no modifications to the end-host network interface, operating system or applications, and is fully backward compatible with Ethernet, IP and TCP. Ideally, the datacenter would also use inexpensive, off-the-shelf Ethernet switches as the basis for large-scale datacenter networks, thereby replacing high-end switches in much the way that commodity personal computers have displaced supercomputers for high-end computing environments.

"The history of computing and technology has an innumerable set of examples where commodity parts take over the functionality of more specialized pieces of equipment," said Vahdat. "But that commoditization hasn't taken place on the communications side. So we do have these specialized components still living in the network infrastructure that incur significant costs and complexity."

"The other issue is that people are treating the datacenter as a mini-Internet," he continued. "That's fine, but they are then forced to use the same components they might use in the wide-area network with a bunch of concerns that don't come up in the datacenter environment: adversarial environments, attacks, parties that might not trust each other, etc. So you have a lot of functionalities in these specialized switching components that you really don't need in your datacenter, and you wind up paying for it in dollars and in complexity."

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