c-Through: part-time optics in data centers

By T. Ng, Guohui Wang, D. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Konstantina (Dina) Papagiannaki, Eugene Ng, Michael A. Kozuch, Michael P. Ryan, Hamid Hajabdolali Bazzaz, Malveeka Tewari and 2 more. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2010

808 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Data-intensive applications that operate on large volumes of data have motivated a fresh look at the design of data center networks. The first wave of proposals focused on designing pure packet-switched networks that provide full bisection bandwidth. However, these proposals significantly increase network complexity in terms of the number of links and switches required and the restricted rules to wire them up. On the other hand, optical circuit switching technology holds a very large bandwidth advantage over packet switching technology. This fact motivates us to explore how optical circuit switching technology could benefit a data center network. In particular, we propose a hybrid packet and circuit switched data center network architecture (or HyPaC for short) which augments the traditional hierarchy of packet switches with a high speed, low complexity, rack-to-rack optical circuit-switched network to supply high bandwidth to applications. We discuss the fundamental requirements of this hybrid architecture and their design options. To demonstrate the potential benefits of the hybrid architecture, we have built a prototype system called c-Through. c-Through represents a design point where the responsibility for traffic demand estimation and traffic demultiplexing resides in end hosts, making it compatible with existing packet switches. Our emulation experiments show that the hybrid architecture can provide large benefits to unmodified popular data center applications at a modest scale. Furthermore, our experimental experience provides useful insights on the applicability of the hybrid architecture across a range of deployment scenarios.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63850d0911a0e7971e6897f6e2182729c1e2d729

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

FireFly (2014, methodology): “Early works such as c-Through [48] and Helios [20] suggested hybrid electric/optical switch architectures, while recent efforts consider all-optical designs [14,41].”
ProjecToR: Agile Reconfigurable Data Center Interconnect (2016, methodology): “Reconﬁg. time Helios, c-Thru, Pro-teus, Solstice [16, 26, 37,38] OCS No 100-320 30 ms Flyways, 3DBeam [23, 40] 60GHz No ≈ 70 10 ms Mordia [ Many researchers have recognized this shortcoming and proposed reconﬁgurable interconnects, using technologies that are able to dynamically change capacity…”
Planck (2014, background): “Additional work has looked at integrating optical links in data centers [10, 40, 42].”
Data Center Networks (2013, neutral): “In this section, we introduce three flexible-topology DCN architectures: c-Through [20], Helios [9] and OSA [5].”
Inside the Social Network's (Datacenter) Network (2015, methodology): “In particular, researchers have proposed inherently non-uniform fabrics which provide qualitatively different connectivity to certain portions of the datacenter through various hybrid designs, typically including either optical [30, 39] or wireless links [25, 40].”
Integrating microsecond circuit switching into the data center (2013, methodology): “, optically [6, 8, 25] or wirelessly [13]) such that more network capacity is allocated to traffic matrix hotspots and overall throughput is maximized.”
Big Data: A Survey (2014, background): “Some plans add optical paths to upgrade the existing networks, and other plans completely replace the current switches [59–64].”
Mirror mirror on the ceiling: flexible wireless links for data centers (2012, background): “Optical circuit switching [20, 39, 42] is an alternative for adding burst bandwidth to data centers.”
Toward Scalable Systems for Big Data Analytics: A Technology Tutorial (2014, background): “Many optical interconnect schemes [87], [91]–[95] have recently been proposed for data center networks.”
MicroTE: fine grained traffic engineering for data centers (2011, methodology): “Prior works implicitly rely on such predictability to augme nt data centers with “flyways” [12, 19].”
A Survey on Optical Interconnects for Data Centers (2012, methodology): “A hybrid electrical-optical network has been presented by G. Wang et al. called c-Through [33],[34].”
A Survey on Network Methodologies for Real-Time Analytics of Massive IoT Data and Open Research Issues (2017, background): “Due to the shortcomings of the static architectures for data center networks, many researchers have considered employing the optical switching technology to construct dynamic data center networks [106], [117], [118].”
Augmenting data center networks with multi-gigabit wireless links (2011, background): “However, before cost or management considerations come into play, we need to ﬁrst understand whether 60GHz wireless will perform well in the DC environment despite the challenges of interference and reliability.”
Survey (2016, background): “The use of optical communications is currently being pursued in all parts of a network, core [Infonetics 2015a], metro [Alcatel Lucent 2013a], and locally (e.g., inside a data center) [Wang et al. 2010].”