Paper Info
Title
Efficient routing and reconfiguration in virtualized HPC environments with vSwitch-enabled lossless networks.
Abstract
To meet the demands of communication-intensive workloads in the cloud, virtual machines (VMs) should utilize low overhead network communication paradigms. In general, such paradigms enable VMs to directly communicate with the hardware by means of a passthrough technology like Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). However, when passthrough-based virtualization is coupled with lossless interconnection networks, live migrations introduce scalability challenges due to the substantial network reconfiguration overhead. With these challenges in mind, we proposed a virtual switch (vSwitch) SR-IOV architecture for InfiniBand in our previous work titled "Towards the InfiniBand SR-IOV vSwitch Architecture". In this paper, we first suggest solutions to rectify the space-domain scalability issues that are present in vSwitch-enabled subnets as a result of the VMs using dedicated layer-two addresses. Then, we discuss routing strategies for virtualized environments using vSwitches and present a routing algorithm for Fat-Trees. We also present a reconfiguration method that minimizes imposed reconfiguration overhead on Fat-Trees. We perform an extensive evaluation of our prototype algorithms, and as vSwitch-enabled hardware does not yet exist, we deduce from empirical observations by emulating vSwitches with existing hardware, as well as large-scale simulations. Our results show significant reduction in the reconfiguration times as route recalculations can be eliminated, and for certain scenarios, the number of reconfiguration subnet management packets sent to switches is reduced from several hundred thousand down to a single one without degrading the routing quality.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1002/cpe.4443
CONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION-PRACTICE & EXPERIENCE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
data centers,hardware virtualization,High Performance Computing (HPC),InfiniBand (IB),lossless networks,network reconfiguration,network routing,scalability,SR-IOV,vSwitch architecture
Journal
31
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
SP2
1532-0626
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Evangelos Tasoulas192.91
Feroz Zahid2144.60
Ernst Gunnar Gran3979.60
Kyrre M. Begnum4174.17
Bjorn Dag Johnsen5295.92
Tor Skeie6110374.67