Performance Evaluation of a Hybrid Optical/Electrical Interconnect (original) (raw)
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Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
In response to the need for faster and fatter networks for large-scale HPC cluster systems, hybrid optical/electrical networks have been proposed as an affordable and high-capacity solution. Still, there is no prior work evaluating the performance of HPC workloads over such types of networks. To fill this gap, this work presents a hybrid network architecture comprising commodity-only equipment, shows its price competitiveness against fat-tree alternatives and presents a prototype implementation. We evaluated several HPC workloads over our prototype, showing that our hybrid optical/electrical network manages to significantly accelerate tested workloads, without incurring any extra cost compared to an all-electronic fat-tree network.
IEEE Network, 2000
ata centers (DCs) are currently the largest closedloop systems in the information technology (IT) and networking worlds, continuously growing toward multi-million-node clouds . DC operators manage and control converged IT and network infrastructures in order to offer a broad range of services and applications to their customers. Typical services and applications provided by current DCs range from traditional IT resource outsourcing (storage, remote desktop, disaster recovery, etc.) to a plethora of web applications (e.g., browsers, social networks, online gaming). Innovative applications and services are also gaining momentum to the point that they will become main representatives of future DC workloads. Among them, we can find high-performance computing (HPC) and big data applications . HPC encompasses a broad set of computationally intensive scientific applications, aiming to solve highly complex problems in the areas of quantum mechanics, molecular modeling, oil and gas exploration, and so on. Big data applications target the analysis of massive amounts of data collected from people on the Internet to analyze and predict their behavior.
The rise of optical interconnects in data centre networks
2012 14th International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON), 2012
The exponential increase of Internet traffic due to cloud computing and other emerging web applications has created the need for more powerful data centres. These warehouse-scale data centres consist of thousands of racks interconnected with commodity switches and consume vast amount of energy. To face the requirements of the future data centres, new interconnection schemes have to be adopted to provide high throughput and reduced power consumption. Several optical interconnects for future data centre networks have recently appeared that provide high throughput, low latency and reduced power consumption. This paper discusses the need for a shift of the data centres networks to the optical domain to reduce the power consumption and meet the bandwidth requirements. Additionally, this paper presents some indicative optical interconnects for high performance data centres that have appeared recently in the research literature. Finally, it presents a qualitative categorization and comparison of these schemes based on their main features such as performance, connectivity and scalability.
Large data center interconnects employing hybrid optical switching
Proceedings of the 2013 18th European Conference on Network and Optical Communications & 2013 8th Conference on Optical Cabling and Infrastructure (NOC-OC&I), 2013
Current data centers (DCs) networks rely on electronic switching and point-to-point interconnects. When considering future DC requirements, point-to-point interconnects will lead to poor network scalability and large power consumption. For this reason several optical switched interconnects for DCs have been recently proposed. However, the proposed optical switching solutions suffer from low flexibility and are not able to provide service differentiation. Furthermore, very few studies evaluate possible improvements in energy efficiency offered by optical switching solutions. In this paper we introduce a novel architecture of interconnects for DCs based on hybrid optical switching (HOS). HOS combines three different optical switching paradigms, namely circuit, burst and packet switching within the same network. Furthermore, HOS envisages the use a two parallel optical switches, a slow and low power consuming switch for the transmission of data using circuits and long bursts, and a fast switch for the transmission of packets and short bursts. The possibility of choosing between circuits, bursts and packets ensures the flexibility required by future DCs. At the same time, the option to select the most suitable switch technology for each data flow guarantees high transmission efficiency and low power consumption.
Helios: A Hybrid Electrical/Optical Switch Architecture for Modular Data Centers
2010
The basic building block of ever larger data centers has shifted from a rack to a modular container with hundreds or even thousands of servers. Delivering scalable bandwidth among such containers is a challenge. A number of recent efforts promise full bisection bandwidth between all servers, though with significant cost, complexity, and power consumption. We present Helios, a hybrid electrical/optical switch architecture that can deliver significant reductions in the number of switching elements, cabling, cost, and power consumption relative to recently proposed data center network architectures. We explore architectural trade offs and challenges associated with realizing these benefits through the evaluation of a fully functional Helios prototype.
Hybrid Electro-Optical Intra-Data Center Networks Tailored for Different Traffic Classes
Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 2018
This work presents a novel approach in intradata center network design and performance evaluation, based on a tailored, long-range dependence data traffic generation model for different application classes. We examine how an intra-data center network can be efficiently evaluated and optimized by applying accurate models for machine-generated data and using assumptions on current and future commercially available data center hardware. Moreover, we show that by migrating such a Fat-Tree network to its hybrid, electro-optical counterpart by employing optical circuit switching for selected, intense traffic connections, significant capital and operational expenditure cost savings can be obtained.
A Survey on Optical Interconnects for Data Centers
2012
Data centers are experiencing an exponential increase in the amount of network traffic that they have to sustain due to cloud computing and several emerging web applications. To face this network load, large data centers are required with thousands of servers interconnected with high bandwidth switches. Current data center networks, based on electronic packet switches, consume excessive power to handle the increased communication bandwidth of emerging applications. Optical interconnects have gained attention recently as a promising solution offering high throughput, low latency and reduced energy consumption compared to current networks based on commodity switches. This paper presents a thorough survey on optical interconnects for next generation data center networks. Furthermore, the paper provides a qualitative categorization and comparison of the proposed schemes based on their main features such as connectivity and scalability. Finally, the paper discusses the cost and the power consumption of these schemes that are of primary importance in the future data center networks.
Sandwich Tree: A new datacenter network based on passive optical devices
Optical Switching and Networking
Most datacenter network designs overwhelmingly use expensive and power-consuming electronic switches or expensive active optical switches with long reconfiguration time. In this paper, we explore architectural solutions to leverage the design elements of Passive Optical Cross-Connection Networks with Multiple Planes (POXN/MPs) and Passive Optical Cross-Connection Networks with Multiple Planes and Bundled Ports (POXN/MP-BPs), both of which consist primarily of passive optical fabrics and optical transceivers that replace groups of switches in hierarchical networks. Through simple physical interconnections, our proposed architectures allow datacenter network (DCN) to incrementally scale out in network capacity. From developed formulas for calculating cost and power consumption, we demonstrate that POXN/MP-BPs can significantly reduce the cost and power consumption of datacenter networks compared to the traditional DCNs. To lower overhead and adapt to the types of real datacenter scenarios that are possible with POXN/MP-BPs, we propose the new Multiple Channels with Bundled Ports Distributed Access Protocol (M-CBDAP), which outperforms the Multiple Channels Distributed Access Protocol (MCDAP) for POXN/MP in terms of bandwidth efficiency, especially for those applications involving higher proportions of inter-rack traffic than intra-rack traffic.
Large-scale hybrid electronic/optical switching networks for datacenters and HPC systems
2015 IEEE 4th International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), 2015
We propose a novel, hybrid optical-electronic switched network architecture with flexible bandwidth provisioning for scaling the capacity of the upper tiers of next generation datacenter and high-performance computing (HPC) networks. The network combines transparent optical packet switches, based on Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) routers, and a deflection routing scheme to alleviate packet buffering requirements in the optical domain. Through simulation studies we show that, coupled with a dynamic switch-port bandwidth provisioning and load balancing scheme, the network can maintain high performance under changing traffic loading.