Fat-Free Topologies
... without antennae, mirrors, and disco-balls?
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Author / Producer
Date
2016-11
Publication Type
Conference Paper
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yes
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Abstract
With the growing size of data center networks, full-bandwidth connectivity between all pairs of servers is becoming difficult and expensive to scale. Thus, numerous recent topology proposals incorporate reconfigurable wireless and optical connectivity, allowing the topology to adapt to the traffic demands --- only servers that require bandwidth at any given time receive such dynamic connections. Implicitly, this work has suggested that statically wired topologies are fundamentally inflexible, and would need to be built at full capacity to handle unpredictably skewed traffic.
We show that the reports of inflexibility of statically wired networks are greatly exaggerated --- if traffic engineering were efficient, certain statically wired networks could achieve performance and cost comparable to topology-adaptive designs, even for skewed workloads. We thus take the position that alongside the development of reconfigurable topologies, the community should also invest in developing superior traffic engineering over static networks other than fat-trees as an alternate path forward. Further, we call for a rigorous quantification of the difference between the power of two techniques for handling dynamic, unpredictable traffic with limited network resources: traffic engineering over suitable static networks, and changing the topology itself dynamically.
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published
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Book title
Proceedings of the 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets '16)
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Pages / Article No.
64 - 70
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Event
15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2016)
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09484 - Singla, Ankit (ehemalig) / Singla, Ankit (former)