CRII: NeTS: Rethinking Flow Control for Cloud Data Center Networks

数据丢失是当今数据中心网络中的一个重要问题。b谷歌、Amazon和Facebook等流行网站构建在数据中心应用程序之上，这些应用程序生成对来自Internet上最终用户的传入请求的响应。在这些应用程序中，生成响应所需的工作分布在大量服务器（计算机）上。不幸的是，这些通信模式导致网络中频繁发生数据丢失事件。由于必须通过重传来恢复网络中的数据丢失，这可能会极大地增加通信延迟（信息在网络中传输所需的时间延迟）。这最终会导致这些公司的收入损失。同样，数据丢失也是采用远程直接内存访问（RDMA）等新技术的一个限制因素。RDMA很重要，因为它可以减少延迟并提高吞吐量，从而提高数据中心应用程序的性能。然而，尽管有它的好处，RDMA并没有被广泛采用，因为当网络中有数据丢失时，RDMA网络接口卡（nic）不能很好地执行。我们提出的研究目标有两个：1)减少应用程序延迟，2)启用重要的新技术，如RDMA。本项目将通过设计一个新的流量控制协议，即防止网络丢失数据的协议来实现其目标。我们的计划是创建一个没有问题的无损网络，它不会由于拥塞而丢失数据，并且还保证提供比丢失数据的等效网络更好或相同的性能。具体而言，该项目旨在开发：用于快速检测交换机和网络接口卡（nic）之间的每流拥塞信息并进行通信的新协议；在当前可用的可编程网络硬件上逼近每流排队的新算法以及构建无损覆盖网络以支持传统设备的新技术。这个项目的软件将广泛地提供给公众重用，研究人员计划将提出的研究整合到伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校的课程中。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Data loss is a significant problem in today's data center networks. Popular websites like Google, Amazon, and Facebook are built on top of data center applications that generate responses to incoming requests from end-users on the Internet. In these applications, the work required to generate a response is distributed across a large number of servers (computers). Unfortunately, these communication patterns lead to frequent events of data loss in the network. Because data loss in the network must be recovered through retransmissions, it can dramatically increase communication latency (the time delay required for information to travel across a network). This can ultimately translate into a loss of revenue for these companies. Similarly, data loss is also a limiting factor on the adoption of new technologies like Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). RDMA is important because it can reduce latency and increase throughput, and this can improve the performance of data center applications. However, despite its benefits, RDMA is not seeing widespread adoption because RDMA Network Interface Cards (NICs) fail to perform well when there is data loss in the network.The goal of our proposed research is twofold: 1) to reduce application latency, and 2) to enable important new technologies like RDMA. This project will accomplish its goals through the design of a new flow control protocol, namely a protocol that prevents the network from dropping data. The plan is to create a problem-free lossless network that does not drop data due to congestion and is also guaranteed to provide better or equal performance to an equivalent network that does drop data. Specifically, this project seeks to develop: new protocols for rapidly detecting and then communicating per-flow congestion information between switches and Network Interface Cards (NICs); novel algorithms for approximating per-flow queuing on currently available programmable networking hardware; and new techniques for building lossless overlay networks to support legacy devices. The software from this project will be made broadly available for public reuse, and the researcher plans to integrate the proposed research into courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.