research-article

Thoughts on load distribution and the role of programmable switches

Authors:

James McCauley,

Arvind Krishnamurthy,

Scott ShenkerAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 49, Issue 1

Pages 18 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3314212.3314216

Published: 20 February 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The trend towards powerfully programmable network switching hardware has led to much discussion of the exciting new ways in which it can be used. In this paper, we take a step back, and examine how it should be used.

References

[1]

M. Alizadeh, T. Edsall, S. Dharmapurikar, R. Vaidyanathan, K. Chu, A. Fingerhut, V. T. Lam, F. Matus, R. Pan, N. Yadav, and G. Varghese. Conga: distributed congestion-aware load balancing for datacenters. In SIGCOMM, 2014.

Digital Library

[2]

Arista. Arista 7170 Series. https://www.arista.com/en/products/7170-series (Retrieved 07/19/2018).

[3]

Barefoot Networks. Product Brief: Berfoot Tofino. https://barefootnetworks.com/products/brief-tofino/ (Retrieved 07/19/2018).

[4]

D. Borman, B. Braden, V. Jacobson, and R. Scheffenegger. Tcp extensions for high performance, September 2014. RFC7323.

[5]

Cavium. XPliant Switch Product Family. https://www.cavium.com/xpliant-ethernet-switch-product-family.html (Retrieved 07/19/2018).

[6]

Cisco. Cisco Catalyst 9000 Family Switches. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/switches/catalyst-9000.html (Retrieved 07/19/2018).

[7]

S. P. Cole. New Trident 3 switch delivers smarter programmability for enterprise and service provider datacenters. https://www.broadcom.com/blog/new-trident-3-switch-delivers-smarter-programmability-for-enterp (Retrieved 07/19/2018), 2017.

[8]

H. T. Dang, D. Sciascia, M. Canini, F. Pedone, and R. Soulé. Netpaxos: consensus at network speed. In SOSR, 2015.

Digital Library

[9]

Y. Desmouceaux, P. Pfister, J. Tollet, M. Townsley, and T. H. Clausen. 6lb: Scalable and application-aware load balancing with segment routing. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 26, 2018.

Digital Library

[10]

F. Duchene and O. Bonaventure. Making multipath tcp friendlier to load balancers and anycast. 2017 IEEE 25th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), pages 1--10, 2017.

[11]

N. Dukkipati and N. McKeown. Why flow-completion time is the right metric for congestion control. Computer Communication Review, 36(1):59--62, 2006.

Digital Library

[12]

D. E. Eisenbud, C. Yi, C. Contavalli, C. Smith, R. Kononov, E. Mann-Hielscher, A. Cilingiroglu, B. Cheyney, W. Shang, and J. D. Hosein. Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer. In NSDI, 2016.

Digital Library

[13]

F5 Networks. BIG-IP Platform. https://f5.com/products/big-ip (Retrieved 07/19/2018).

[14]

B. Fan, H. Lim, D. G. Andersen, and M. Kaminsky. Small cache, big effect: provable load balancing for randomly partitioned cluster services. In SoCC, 2011.

Digital Library

[15]

C. Filsfils, N. K. Nainar, C. Pignataro, J. C. Cardona, and P. FranÃğois. The Segment Routing Architecture. 2015 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2014.

[16]

A. Ford, C. Raiciu, M. Handley, and O. Bonaventure. Tcp extensions for multipath operation with multiple addresses. RFC, 6824:1--64, 2013.

[17]

A. Ford, C. Raiciu, M. Handley, O. Bonaventure, and C. Paasch. TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple Addresses - draft-ietf-mptcp-rfc6824bis-11. RFC 6824bis Draft, IETF, May 2018.

[18]

Intel. Programmable ASICs: Flexibility at Wire Speed on TechWiseTV. https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en<sub>u</sub>s/training-events/events-webinars/webinars/techwise-tv/214-programmable-asics.html (Retrieved 07/19/2018).

[19]

Intel. Intel Ethernet Switch FM6000 Series. https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/ethernet-switch-fm6000-series-brief.pdf (Retrieved 07/19/2018), 2012.

[20]

T. Jepsen, M. Moshref, A. Carzaniga, N. Foster, and R. Soulé. Life in the fast lane: A line-rate linear road. In SOSR, 2018.

Digital Library

[21]

T. Jepsen, M. Moshref, A. Carzaniga, N. Foster, and R. Soulé. Packet subscriptions for programmable asics. In HotNets, 2018.

Digital Library

[22]

X. Jin, X. Li, H. Zhang, N. Foster, J. Lee, R. Soulé, C. Kim, and I. Stoica. Netchain: Scale-free sub-rtt coordination. In NSDI, 2018.

Digital Library

[23]

X. Jin, X. Li, H. Zhang, R. Soulé, J. Lee, N. Foster, C. Kim, and I. Stoica. Netcache: Balancing key-value stores with fast in-network caching. In SOSP, 2017.

Digital Library

[24]

A. Langley, A. Riddoch, A. Wilk, A. Vicente, C. Krasic, D. Zhang, F. Yang, F. Kouranov, I. Swett, J. R. Iyengar, J. Bailey, J. Dorfman, J. Roskind, J. Kulik, P. Westin, R. Tenneti, R. Shade, R. Hamilton, V. Vasiliev, W.-T. Chang, and Z. Shi. The quic transport protocol: Design and internet-scale deployment. In SIGCOMM, 2017.

Digital Library

[25]

R. Miao, H. Zeng, C. Kim, J. Lee, and M. Yu. Silkroad: Making stateful layer-4 load balancing fast and cheap using switching asics. In SIGCOMM, 2017.

Digital Library

[26]

S. Narayana, A. Sivaraman, V. Nathan, P. Goyal, V. Arun, M. Alizadeh, V. Jeyakumar, and C. Kim. Language-directed hardware design for network performance monitoring. In SIGCOMM, 2017.

Digital Library

[27]

V. Olteanu and C. Raiciu. Datacenter scale load balancing for multipath transport. In Proceedings of the 2016 Workshop on Hot Topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization, HotMIddlebox '16, pages 20--25, New York, NY, USA, 2016. ACM.

[28]

V. A. Olteanu, A. Agache, A. Voinescu, and C. Raiciu. Stateless datacenter load-balancing with beamer. In NSDI, 2018.

Digital Library

[29]

A. Panda, S. Han, K. Jang, M. Walls, S. Ratnasamy, and S. Shenker. Netbricks: Taking the v out of nfv. In OSDI, 2016.

Digital Library

[30]

P. Patel, D. Bansal, L. Yuan, A. Murthy, A. Greenberg, D. A. Maltz, R. Kern, H. Kumar, M. Zikos, H. Wu, et al. Ananta: Cloud scale load balancing. Computer Communication Review, 43(4):207--218, 2013.

Digital Library

[31]

J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system design. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst., 2:277--288, 1981.

Digital Library

[32]

A. Sapio, I. Abdelaziz, M. Canini, and P. Kalnis. Daiet: a system for data aggregation inside the network. In SoCC, 2017.

Digital Library

[33]

N. K. Sharma, A. Kaufmann, T. E. Anderson, A. Krishnamurthy, J. S. Nelson, and S. Peter. Evaluating the power of flexible packet processing for network resource allocation. In NSDI, 2017.

Digital Library

[34]

N. K. Sharma, M. Liu, K. Atreya, and A. Krishnamurthy. Approximating fair queueing on reconfigurable switches. In NSDI, 2018.

Digital Library

[35]

A. Sivaraman, S. Subramanian, M. Alizadeh, S. Chole, S.-T. Chuang, A. Agrawal, H. Balakrishnan, T. Edsall, S. Katti, and N. McKeown. Programmable packet scheduling at line rate. In SIGCOMM, 2016.

Digital Library

[36]

H. Zhao and J. F. Canny. Sparse allreduce: Efficient scalable communication for power-law data. CoRR, abs/1312.3020, 2013.

Cited By

Tajbakhsh HParizotto RSchaeffer-Filho AHaque I(2024)P4Hauler: An Accelerator-Aware In-Network Load Balancer for Applications Performance BoostingIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2024.338965812:2(697-711)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCC.2024.3389658
Hossein Abbasi Abyaneh ALiao MZahedi S(2023)Malcolm: Multi-agent Learning for Cooperative Load Management at Rack ScaleACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3606376.359355051:1(39-40)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3606376.3593550
Parizotto RCoelho BNunes DHaque ISchaeffer-Filho A(2023)Offloading Machine Learning to Programmable Data Planes: A Systematic SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/360515356:1(1-34)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605153
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Thoughts on load distribution and the role of programmable switches
1. Networks
  1. Network architectures
    1. Programming interfaces
  2. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement

Recommendations

Design and synthesis of programmable logic block with mixed LUT and macrogate

Small gates, such as AND2, XOR2, and MUX2, have been mixed with lookup tables (LUTs) inside programmable logic blocks (PLBs) to reduce area and power and increase performance in FPGAs. However, it is unclear whether incorporating macrogates with wide ...
Better by a HAIR: Hardware-amenable internet routing
ICNP '09: Proceedings of the 2009 17th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols. ICNP 2009

Routing protocols are implemented in the form of software running on a general-purpose microprocessor. However, conventional software-based router architectures face significant scaling challenges in the presence of ever-increasing routing table growth ...
Embedded Design Using Programmable Gate Arrays

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 49, Issue 1

January 2019

33 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/3314212

Editor:
Olivier Bonaventure

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2019 Authors.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 February 2019

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 49, Issue 1

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

24
Total Citations
View Citations
540
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)35
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 09 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Tajbakhsh HParizotto RSchaeffer-Filho AHaque I(2024)P4Hauler: An Accelerator-Aware In-Network Load Balancer for Applications Performance BoostingIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2024.338965812:2(697-711)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCC.2024.3389658
Hossein Abbasi Abyaneh ALiao MZahedi S(2023)Malcolm: Multi-agent Learning for Cooperative Load Management at Rack ScaleACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3606376.359355051:1(39-40)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3606376.3593550
Parizotto RCoelho BNunes DHaque ISchaeffer-Filho A(2023)Offloading Machine Learning to Programmable Data Planes: A Systematic SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/360515356:1(1-34)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605153
Wu XWang ZWang WNg TSchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Augmented Queue: A Scalable In-Network Abstraction for Data Center Network SharingProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604858(305-318)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604858
Hossein Abbasi Abyaneh ALiao MZahedi SSmirni EAvrachenkov KGill PUrgaonkar B(2023)Malcolm: Multi-agent Learning for Cooperative Load Management at Rack ScaleAbstract Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems10.1145/3578338.3593550(39-40)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578338.3593550
Segal RAvin CScalosub G(2023)SOAR: Minimizing Network Utilization Cost With Bounded In-Network ComputingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.333606721:2(1832-1851)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3336067
Feng WLiu CCheng BChen JWan Z(2023)An End-Host-Importance-Aware Secure Service-Enabled Hybrid SDN DeploymentIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2022.320869520:2(2056-2070)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNSM.2022.3208695
Xie GLi QDuan GJiang YQi ZLiu SWang Q(2023)Efficient Flow Recording with InheritSketch on Programmable Switches2023 IEEE 43rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00043(1-11)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDCS57875.2023.00043
Li JLu YZhang YWang QCheng ZHuang KShu J(2022)SwitchTxProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3551793.355183815:11(2881-2894)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3551793.3551838
Abyaneh ALiao MZahedi S(2022)Malcolm: Multi-agent Learning for Cooperative Load Management at Rack ScaleProceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems10.1145/35706116:3(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570611
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents