HPCwire: Computer Scientists Introduce PortLand

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Topic >> Networks

August 17, 2009

Computer Scientists Introduce PortLand

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

University of California San Diego computer scientists present PortLand at SIGCOMM 2009

Aug. 17 -- University of California, San Diego computer scientists have created software that they hope will lead to datacenters that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern datacenter networks. The software system -- PortLand -- is a fault-tolerant, layer 2 datacenter network fabric capable of scaling to 100,000 nodes and beyond. PortLand is fully compatible with existing hardware and routing protocols and holds promise for supporting large-scale, datacenter networks by increasing inherent scalability, providing baseline support for virtual machines and migration, and dramatically reducing administrative overhead. Critically, it removes the reliance on a single spanning tree, natively leveraging multipath routing and improving fault tolerance. The computer scientists report this advance in datacenter networking on August 18, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier computer networking conference.

"With PortLand, we came up with a set of algorithms and protocols that combine the best of layer 2 and layer 3 network fabrics," said Amin Vahdat, the senior author on the SIGCOMM paper and a computer science professor at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. "Today, the largest datacenters contain over 100,000 servers. Ideally, we would like to have the flexibility to run any application on any server while minimizing the amount of required network configuration and state."

As mega datacenters handle more and more of the world's computing and storage needs, datacenter networking is becoming increasingly important, the computer scientists say. Loading the front page of any active Facebook user, for example, typically involves over 1,000 servers in 300 milliseconds or less.

Looking for ways to improve datacenter networking, Vahdat and his team of graduate students from the Jacobs School of Engineering revisited the long-standing trade-offs between layer 2 or Ethernet networks -- which route on MAC addresses -- and layer 3 networks -- which route on IP addresses.

Their result: PortLand, a system of algorithms and protocols that eliminates the scalability and routing-path limitations of existing layer 2 approaches and avoids the administrative and virtualization headaches caused by implementing layer 3 networks in datacenter environments.

Today's datacenters are often run on layer 3 networks, but this demands huge numbers of person-hours to set up and maintain the networks. Layer 3 networks also prohibit straightforward implementation of virtual machine migration -- limiting flexibility and efforts to reduce energy and cost in the datacenter.

"Our goal is to allow datacenter operators to manage their network as a single fabric," said Vahdat, who directs the Center for Network Systems at UC San Diego. "We are working toward a network that administrators can think of as one massive 100,000-port switch seamlessly serving over one million virtual endpoints."

Location Discovery

One of PortLand's key innovations is its location discovery protocol, which opens up the possibility of a scalable layer 2 network. Switches automatically learn their location within the datacenter topology without any human intervention. These switches, then, assign "Pseudo MAC" (PMAC) addresses to each of the servers they connect to. These PMAC addresses -- rather than MAC addresses -- are used internally in the network for packet forwarding.

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

Chips Ahoy: Vendors Show Off Their Latest Silicon

Chipmakers converged on San Francisco this week to talk up their newest semiconductor products at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). Of particular interest to the HPC crowd are Intel's Westmere EP and "Tukwila" Itanium 9300, and IBM's POWER7.
Read More...

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html