The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Current datacenter networks inherit the principles that went into the design of the Internet, where packet transmission and path selection decisions are distributed among the endpoints and routers. Instead, we propose that each sender should delegate control—to a centralized arbiter—of when each packet should be transmitted and what path it should follow.

Fastpass is a datacenter network architecture built using this principle. Fastpass incorporates two fast algorithms: the first determines the time at which each packet should be transmitted, while the second determines the path to use for that packet. In addition, Fastpass uses an efficient protocol between the endpoints and the arbiter, and an arbiter replication strategy for fault-tolerant failover. We deployed and evaluated Fastpass in a portion of Facebook’s datacenter network. Our results show that Fastpass achieves high throughput comparable to current networks at a 240× reduction is queue lengths, achieves much fairer and consistent flow throughputs than the baseline TCP, is able to schedule 2.21 Terabits/s of traffic in software on eight cores, and reduces the number of TCP retransmissions in a latency-sensitive service at Facebook by a 2.5×.

Bio:
Jonathan received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University in 2003, after which he worked for 7 years in communication systems R&D and HPC algorithm development in an army technological unit. He is currently a Ph.D student in MIT CSAIL's Networks and Mobile Systems group, advised by Hari Balakrishnan and Devavrat Shah.