NeTS: Small: Software-Defined Data Plane for Datacenters

NeTS：小型：数据中心的软件定义数据平面

• 批准号: 1616774
• 负责人: Arvind Krishnamurthy
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-09-01 至 2019-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1616774&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NeTS; Small; Software; Defined; Data

Many popular cloud applications that power our daily lives, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter, spend a large fraction of their time performing network operations. Even supposedly computationally intensive applications such as parallel machine learning are often limited by communication performance. Datacenter network designers have been racing to keep up with this increased reliance on network usage, but they have had only limited success in achieving desirable system properties as they are often constrained by the lack of switch support for deploying new protocols.Fortunately, innovation in switch and network interface card (NIC) design is now focused on building not just faster but also more flexible packet processing devices. Whereas traditional switches and NICs typically provide functionality to route and forward packets, many upcoming switches have support for transforming the packet as well as performing computations on the packet before routing it towards its destination. These devices have the potential to revolutionize the use of networking devices within datacenters as they provide the ability to reconfigure packet processing and deploy new protocols.This project will investigate flexible packet processing functionality on NICs and switches and their potential for optimizing high performance networked systems inside the datacenter. This work provides new abstractions and building blocks for the use of flexible packet processing pipelines, while respecting the hardware constraints that will be associated with these technologies. The researchers will examine how the resulting data plane functionality can be used to implement resource allocation mechanisms inside the datacenter so as to enable congestion control, performance isolation, adaptive routing, and efficient load balancing. They will also examine implementing on the NICs and switches some of the packet processing traditionally done in end-host software. The goal is to show how and by how much flexible packet processing can benefit widely used datacenter applications and also provide guidance on what features that future iterations of the hardware should provide in order to significantly improve application performance.Broader Impact: Network-intensive datacenter applications are used by literally billions of people around the globe on a daily basis. By improving the efficiency of network operations, results from this project can dramatically reduce the cost of provisioning existing public services, like Wikipedia, as well as make it much cheaper for new public services to be developed. By enabling the deployment of more effective resource allocation protocols on flexible switches, this work also has the potential to provide substantial improvements to the networking performance within datacenters. The researchers will publicly release the developed software and enable a rich set of network protocols and high-performance datacenter applications.

许多为我们的日常生活提供动力的流行云应用程序，例如Facebook，Google，Amazon和Twitter，花费了很大一部分时间执行网络操作。 即使是所谓的计算密集型应用程序，如并行机器学习，也常常受到通信性能的限制。 数据中心网络设计人员一直在努力跟上这种对网络使用的日益依赖，但他们在实现理想的系统属性方面只取得了有限的成功，因为他们经常受到缺乏交换机支持部署新协议的限制。幸运的是，交换机和网络接口卡（NIC）设计的创新现在不仅集中在构建更快的设备上，而且还集中在构建更灵活的数据包处理设备上。传统的交换机和交换机通常提供路由和转发数据包的功能，而许多即将推出的交换机支持转换数据包以及在将数据包路由到其目的地之前对数据包执行计算。 这些设备有可能彻底改变数据中心内网络设备的使用，因为它们提供了重新配置数据包处理和部署新协议的能力。本项目将研究数据交换机和交换机上灵活的数据包处理功能，以及它们优化数据中心内高性能网络系统的潜力。这项工作提供了新的抽象和构建块的灵活的数据包处理管道的使用，同时尊重与这些技术相关联的硬件约束。 研究人员将研究如何使用由此产生的数据平面功能来实现数据中心内部的资源分配机制，以便实现拥塞控制，性能隔离，自适应路由和有效的负载平衡。 他们还将研究在以太网和交换机上实现一些传统上在终端主机软件中完成的数据包处理。其目标是展示灵活的数据包处理如何以及在多大程度上可以使广泛使用的数据中心应用程序受益，并就未来硬件迭代应提供哪些功能以显著提高应用程序性能提供指导。更广泛的影响：地球仪每天有数十亿人使用网络密集型数据中心应用程序。通过提高网络运营的效率，该项目的成果可以大大降低提供现有公共服务（如维基百科）的成本，并使开发新的公共服务的成本大大降低。通过在灵活的交换机上部署更有效的资源分配协议，这项工作也有可能大大提高网络中心的网络性能。 研究人员将公开发布开发的软件，并启用一组丰富的网络协议和高性能数据中心应用程序。