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Modern data centers (DCs) employ various traffic load balancers to achieve high bisection bandwidth. Among them, flowlet switching has shown remarkable performance in both load balancing and upper-layer protocol (e.g., TCP) friendliness. However, flowlet-based load balancers suffer from the inflexibility of flowlet timeout value (FTV) and result in sub-optimal performance under various application workloads. To this end, we propose Halflife, a novel flowletbased load balancer that leverages fading FTVs to reroute traffic promptly under different workloads without any prior knowledge. Halflife not only balances traffic better, but also avoids the performance degradation caused by frequent oscillation or shifting of flows between paths. Furthermore, Halflife’s fading mechanism is not only compatible with most flowlet-based load balancers, such as CONGA and LetFlow, but also improves their performance when leveraging flowlet switching in RDMA network. Through testbed experiments and simulations, we prove that Halflife improves the performance of CONGA and LetFlow by 10% ∼ 150%, and it outperforms other load balancers by 30% ∼ 200% across most application workloads.

RDMA is promising for enhancing the performance of cross-datacenter (DC) services. However, deploying RDMA over wide-area networks introduces severe congestion control unfairness, primarily due to asymmetric congestion feedback delays between inter-DC flows and intra-DC flows. As a result, intra-DC flows often bear the full burden of congestion response, leading to drastically increased flow completion times (FCT). In this work, we identify two key forms of unfairness — nearsource and near-destination — depending on whether congestion occurs near the sender or receiver of inter-DC flows. Based on this, we propose THEMIS, a fairness maintenance patch for long-haul RDMA networks. To mitigate near-source unfairness, THEMIS devises a Proactive Notification Point to shorten the congestion feedback loop within a single DC. To alleviate neardestination unfairness, THEMIS introduces a Temporary Reaction Point to temporarily slow down the target inter-DC flow until the sender receives the corresponding congestion feedback. We implement an open-source prototype of THEMIS, and evaluate it on both real-world testbed and large-scale simulations. Compared to DCQCN, Annulus and BiCC, THEMIS reduces the intra-DC FCT by up to 79.2%, 63.6% and 55.6%, and decreases overall FCT by up to 61.2%, 31.9% and 59.5% respectively.

Modern datacenter applications demand high throughput (40Gbps) and ultra-low latency 10 µs per hop from the network, with low CPU overhead. Standard TCP/IP stacks cannot meet these requirements, but Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) can. On IP-routed datacenter networks, RDMA is deployed using RoCEv2 protocol, which relies on Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) to enable a drop-free network. However, PFC can lead to poor application performance due to problems like head-of-line blocking and unfairness. To alleviates these problems, we introduce DCQCN, an end-to-end congestion control scheme for RoCEv2. To optimize DCQCN performance, we build a fluid model, and provide guidelines for tuning switch buffer thresholds, and other protocol parameters. Using a 3-tier Clos network testbed, we show that DCQCN dramatically improves throughput and fairness of RoCEv2 RDMA traffic. DCQCN is implemented in Mellanox NICs, and is being deployed in Microsoft’s datacenters.