The above three projects are based on dynamically configuring circuit switches in response to changes in workload, requiring network-wide demand estimation, centralized circuit assignment, and tight time synchronization between various network elements. Moreover, their designs have been based on novel UCSD-developed switches that, while reconfiguring much faster than commercial devices, operate in much the same ways as commercial devices. This design decision fundamentally limits the scale of network they can support. Our most recent project is RotorNet, which is a circuit-based network design that addresses these two challenges. While RotorNet dynamically reconfigures its constituent circuit switches, it decouples switch configuration from traffic patterns, obviating the need for demand collection and admitting a fully decentralized control plane. At the physical layer, RotorNet relaxes the requirements on the underlying circuit switches—in particular by not requiring individual switches to implement a full crossbar—enabling them to scale to 1000s of ports. We’ve designed and built the underlying Rotor Switch, and used it to build a working prototype architecture.
Publications
Inside the Social Network’s (Datacenter) Network, Arjun Roy, Hongyi Zeng, Jasmeet Bagga, George Porter, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, London, England, August 2015.
61 Port 1x6 Selector Switch for Data Center Networks, William Mellette, Glenn M. Schuster, George Porter, and Joseph Ford, Optical Fiber Communication Conference, March 2016, pages M3I.3.
Using Indirect Routing to Recover from Network Traffic Scheduling Estimation Error, Conglong Li, Matthew Mukerjee, David G. Andersen, Srinivasan Seshan, Michael Kaminsky, George Porter, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), Beijing, China, May 2017.
RotorNet: A Scalable, Low-complexity, Optical Datacenter Network, William M. Mellette, Rob McGuinness, Arjun Roy, Alex Forencich, George Papen, Alex C. Snoeren, and George Porter, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Los Angeles, California, August 2017.
Toward Optical Switching in the Data Center, William M. Mellette, Alex C. Snoeren, and George Porter, IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing, Bucharest, Romania, June 2018.
Evaluating the Performance of Software NICs for 100-Gb/s Datacenter Traffic Control, Rob McGuinness and George Porter, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), Ithaca, New York, July 2018.