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Integrating microsecond circuit switching into the data center

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Recent proposals have employed optical circuit switching (OCS) to reduce the cost of data center networks. However, the relatively slow switching times (10--100 ms) assumed by these approaches, and the accompanying latencies of their control planes, has limited its use to only the largest data center networks with highly aggregated and constrained workloads. As faster switch technologies become available, designing a control plane capable of supporting them becomes a key challenge.
In this paper, we design and implement an OCS prototype capable of switching in 11.5 us, and we use this prototype to expose a set of challenges that arise when supporting switching at microsecond time scales. In response, we propose a microsecond-latency control plane based on a circuit scheduling approach we call Traffic Matrix Scheduling (TMS) that proactively communicates circuit assignments to communicating entities so that circuit bandwidth can be used efficiently.

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        Published In

        cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
        ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 43, Issue 4
        October 2013
        595 pages
        ISSN:0146-4833
        DOI:10.1145/2534169
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
          August 2013
          580 pages
          ISBN:9781450320566
          DOI:10.1145/2486001
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 27 August 2013
        Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 43, Issue 4

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        Author Tags

        1. data center networks
        2. optical networks

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        • (2024)Dynamic capacity sharing with multi-wavelength integrated transmitters in hybrid datacenter networksJournal of Optical Communications and Networking10.1364/JOCN.52844316:10(990)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
        • (2024)Orchid: enhancing HPC interconnection networks through infrequent topology reconfigurationJournal of Optical Communications and Networking10.1364/JOCN.51603116:6(644)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
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