research-article

pHost: distributed near-optimal datacenter transport over commodity network fabric

Authors:

Akshay Narayan,

Rachit Agarwal,

Sylvia Ratnasamy,

Scott ShenkerAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '15: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

Article No.: 1, Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/2716281.2836086

Published: 01 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The importance of minimizing flow completion times (FCT) in datacenters has led to a growing literature on new network transport designs. Of particular note is pFabric, a protocol that achieves near-optimal FCTs. However, pFabric's performance comes at the cost of generality, since pFabric requires specialized hardware that embeds a specific scheduling policy within the network fabric, making it hard to meet diverse policy goals. Aiming for generality, the recent Fastpass proposal returns to a design based on commodity network hardware and instead relies on a centralized scheduler. Fastpass achieves generality, but (as we show) loses many of pFabric's performance benefits.

We present pHost, a new transport design aimed at achieving both: the near-optimal performance of pFabric and the commodity network design of Fastpass. Similar to Fastpass, pHost keeps the network simple by decoupling the network fabric from scheduling decisions. However, pHost introduces a new distributed protocol that allows end-hosts to directly make scheduling decisions, thus avoiding the overheads of Fastpass's centralized scheduler architecture. We show that pHost achieves performance on par with pFabric (within 4% for typical conditions) and significantly outperforms Fastpass (by a factor of 3.8×) while relying only on commodity network hardware.

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Cited By

Bernárdez GSuárez-Varela JShi XXiao SCheng XBarlet-Ros PCabellos-Aparicio A(2025)GraphCC: A practical graph learning-based approach to Congestion Control in datacentersComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110981257(110981)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110981
Agarwal SCai QAgarwal RShmoys DVahdat AVanbever LZhang I(2024)HarmonyProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691845(329-343)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691845
Dhamija AMadhavan BLi HMeng JKhare SRao MBrakmo LSpring NKannan PSundaresan SGhorbani SVanbever LZhang I(2024)A large-scale deployment of DCTCPProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691839(239-252)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691839
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

pHost: distributed near-optimal datacenter transport over commodity network fabric
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
    1. Transport protocols
  2. Network types
    1. Data center networks

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CoNEXT '15: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

December 2015

483 pages

ISBN:9781450334129

DOI:10.1145/2716281

General Chairs:
Felipe Huici
NEC Europe Ltd
,
Giuseppe Bianchi
University of Rome Tor Vergata

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 December 2015

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CoNEXT '15

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SIGCOMM

CoNEXT '15: Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

December 1 - 4, 2015

Heidelberg, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

Bernárdez GSuárez-Varela JShi XXiao SCheng XBarlet-Ros PCabellos-Aparicio A(2025)GraphCC: A practical graph learning-based approach to Congestion Control in datacentersComputer Networks10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110981257(110981)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110981
Agarwal SCai QAgarwal RShmoys DVahdat AVanbever LZhang I(2024)HarmonyProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691845(329-343)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691845
Dhamija AMadhavan BLi HMeng JKhare SRao MBrakmo LSpring NKannan PSundaresan SGhorbani SVanbever LZhang I(2024)A large-scale deployment of DCTCPProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691839(239-252)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691839
Zhang YMeng QHu CRen FVanbever LZhang I(2024)Revisiting congestion control for lossless ethernetProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691833(131-148)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
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Shani ASadrhaghighi SDolati MGhaderi M(2024)Opportunistic Packet Forwarding for Proactive Transport in Datacenters2024 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619903(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619903
Amir DSaran NWilson TKleinberg RShrivastav VWeatherspoon HSekar VYu MSeneviratne AVeitch D(2024)Shale: A Practical, Scalable Oblivious Reconfigurable NetworkProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672248(449-464)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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Liang CSong XCheng JWang MLiu YLiu ZZhao SCui YSekar VYu MSeneviratne AVeitch D(2024)NegotiaToR: Towards A Simple Yet Effective On-demand Reconfigurable Datacenter NetworkProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672222(415-432)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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Canel CMadhavan BSundaresan SSpring NKannan PZhang YLin KSeshan SVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Understanding Incast Bursts in Modern DatacentersProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689028(674-680)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
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Fan ZZhang WChen YTian WTu CLiu Y(2024)Shaped Quota: More Efficient and More Versatile Congestion Control2024 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)10.1109/WCNC57260.2024.10570647(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2024
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