Unveiling the Secrets of High-Performance Datacenters

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Michael Schapira, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Thursday 02 April 2015, 10:00-11:00
• Auditorium, Microsoft Research Ltd, 21 Station Road, Cambridge, CB1 2FB.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins.

This event may be recorded and made available internally or externally via http://research.microsoft.com. Microsoft will own the copyright of any recordings made. If you do not wish to have your image/voice recorded please consider this before attending

Many architectures for high-performance datacenters have been proposed to meet the ever-growing traffic demands. Surprisingly, recent studies show that random datacenter topologies outperform much more sophisticated designs, achieving near-optimal throughput and bisection bandwidth, high resiliency to failures, incremental expandability, high cost efficiency, and more. While this highlights the suboptimality of existing datacenters, the inherent unstructuredness and unpredictability of random datacenter topologies pose obstacles to their adoption in practice. Can these guarantees be achieved by well-structured, deterministic datacenter architectures? We provide a surprising affirmative answer to this question. We show, through a combination of theoretical analyses, extensive simulations, and experiments with e network emulator, that any network topology that belongs to the extensively studied class of “expander graphs” (as indeed do random graphs) comes with these benefits, and more, thus opening a new avenue for highperformance datacenter design: turning ideas from the rich literature on deterministically constructing expander graphs into an operational reality. We leverage these insights to propose novel deterministic datacenter architectures that achieve all of the above desiderata, and significantly outperform traditional datacenter designs. We discuss challenges en route to deploying expander datacenters (e.g., cabling, routing) and explain how these can be resolved. Our results suggest that the key to future progress on designing high-performance datacenters lies in exploring design tradeoffs within the space of expander datacenters.

This talk is part of the Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Auditorium, Microsoft Research Ltd, 21 Station Road, Cambridge, CB1 2FB
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Guy Emerson's list
• Interested Talks
• Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks
• Optics for the Cloud
• PMRFPS's
• School of Technology
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• personal list
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.