With the advent of cloud computing, we believe that an increasing fraction of global computation and storage will take place in a relatively small number of mega-scale data centers. While tremendous progress has been made in potentially storing exabytes of data and delivering exaflops of aggregate computation in the data center, there is relatively little understanding on how to build an exa-scale network infrastructure to support all this computation and storage.
We consider the requirements for a scalable, easily manageable, fault-tolerant, and efficient data center network fabric. Trends in multi-core processors, end-host virtualization, and commodities of scale are pointing to future single-site data centers with millions of virtual end points. Existing layer 2 and layer 3 network protocols face some combination of limitations in such a setting: lack of scalability, difficult management, inflexible communication, or limited support for virtual machine migration. We observe that data center networks are ideally managed as a single logical network fabric with a known baseline topology and growth model. We leverage this observation in the design and implementation of PortLand, a scalable, fault tolerant layer 2 routing and forwarding protocol for data centers and place the work in the context of our larger efforts in data center networking.
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About the speaker:
Amin Vahdat is a Professor and holds the Science Applications International Corporation Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego. He is also the Director of UCSD's Center for Networked Systems. Vahdat's research focuses broadly on computer systems, including distributed systems, networks, and operating systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1998 under the supervision of Thomas Anderson after spending the last year and a half as a Research Associate at the University of Washington. Before joining UCSD in 2004, he was on the faculty at Duke University from 1999-2003. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2000, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2003, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award in 2003.