The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Datacenter congestion control remains to be a hard problem. The root of the problem is that the ability of end-hosts to react to congestion is fundamentally limited by the timeliness and precision of congestion signals from the network. Unfortunately, despite decades of research, the community is still in quest of such timely and precise congestion signals. In this talk, I will discuss a possible new approach to datacenter congestion control problem: designing network fabrics that never drop packets at network switches. This results in localizing the congestion to egress queues of the end-hosts, precisely where congestion control is implemented. I will discuss how this approach can not only achieve latency and throughput close to state-of-the-art protocols in the common-case scenario, but also provide worst-case performance bounds. I will also discuss how this approach opens up many interesting avenues of systems research. Bio: Rachit Agarwal is an assistant professor at Cornell University, where he leads a wonderful group of students working on systems, networking and security. Prior to coming to Cornell, Rachit was a workaholic postdoc at UC Berkeley, a lazy PhD student at UIUC and a mischievous undergrad at IIT Kanpur. His webpage has more details on his students and their projects.