The importance of minimizing flow completion times (FCT) in datacenters has led to a growing literature on new network transport designs. Of particular note is pFabric, a protocol that achieves near-optimal FCTs. However, pFabric’s performance comes at the cost of generality, since pFabric requires specialized hardware that embeds a specific scheduling policy within the network […]
Most datacenter network (DCN) designs focus on maximizing bisection bandwidth rather than minimizing server-to-server latency. We explore architectural approaches to building low-latency DCNs and introduce Quartz, a design element consisting of a full mesh of switches. Quartz can be used to replace portions of either a hierarchical network or a random network. Our analysis shows […]