NSF Award
2313164
As the modern “factories” for the Internet, datacenters fuel our increasingly digital world. They host the majority of today’s applications ranging from email to e-healthcare solutions. These applications have exceedingly low latency requirements. Meeting these requirements is challenging due to network congestion. Traditional approaches for managing congestion are not well-suited for today’s increasingly complex and highly dynamic networks. In particular, they fail to react fast enough to pervasive short-lived spikes in network traffic. The goal of this research is to address this challenge by developing new paradigms for fast congestion identification and management in datacenter networks. If successful, the project will improve the speed and efficiency of cloud-based applications. It can also enable future latency-sensitive applications.<br/><br/>The project posits that ideal congestion control depends on the time scale of the congestion event. For example, real-time and local congestion management techniques such as packet deflection can effectively manage microsecond-scale congestion. However, the same techniques can cause instability, throughput collapse and, ironically, increased latency if deployed during widescale congestion. Identifying and reacting based on the scale of congestion is challenging in today’s dynamic, large-scale, and complex networks. To resolve these challenges, this project pursues two lines of inquiry: (a) do congestion events scale in datacenters and how frequently? What are the structural properties and origins of congestion events? and (b) can we design multi-scale congestion management systems and enable various techniques to interoperate? This project will build a holistic measurement framework that systematically and automatically analyzes the scaling of congestion from multiple vantage points deployed in various layers of hosts and different topological locations in the network. This project will also develop multi-scale congestion management techniques and introduce novel abstractions that allow these techniques to interoperate by dividing the task of congestion handling among different techniques based on the scale of congestion.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
