HPCwire: Computer Scientists Introduce PortLand

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August 17, 2009

Computer Scientists Introduce PortLand

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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.

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