Paper Info
Title
Presto: Edge-based Load Balancing for Fast Datacenter Networks
Abstract
Datacenter networks deal with a variety of workloads, ranging from latency-sensitive small flows to bandwidth-hungry large flows. Load balancing schemes based on flow hashing, e.g., ECMP, cause congestion when hash collisions occur and can perform poorly in asymmetric topologies. Recent proposals to load balance the network require centralized traffic engineering, multipath-aware transport, or expensive specialized hardware. We propose a mechanism that avoids these limitations by (i) pushing load-balancing functionality into the soft network edge (e.g., virtual switches) such that no changes are required in the transport layer, customer VMs, or networking hardware, and (ii) load balancing on fine-grained, near-uniform units of data (flowcells) that fit within end-host segment offload optimizations used to support fast networking speeds. We design and implement such a soft-edge load balancing scheme, called Presto, and evaluate it on a 10 Gbps physical testbed. We demonstrate the computational impact of packet reordering on receivers and propose a mechanism to handle reordering in the TCP receive offload functionality. Presto's performance closely tracks that of a single, non-blocking switch over many workloads and is adaptive to failures and topology asymmetry.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2829988.2787507
Special Interest Group on Data Communication
Keywords
Field
DocType
load balancing,software-defined networking
Network Load Balancing Services,Computer science,Load balancing (computing),Network packet,Networking hardware,Computer network,Network topology,Edge device,Hash function,Software-defined networking,Distributed computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
45
4
0146-4833
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
46
1.56
37
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Keqiang He130219.27
Eric Rozner264228.07
Kanak B. Agarwal332828.02
Wes Felter459852.82
John B. Carter51785162.82
Aditya Akella64138268.44