Designing Easy-to-Deploy Optical Circuit Switched Data Center Networks

Event Date:
April 24, 2023
Location:
10:30 am
Contact Name:
MSEE 239
Priority:
No
School or Program:
Electrical and Computer Engineering
College Calendar:
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Shizhen Zhao
Associate Professor
John Hopcroft Center
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Abstract

As network demand keeps increasing, building high-bandwidth data center networks (DCN) is becoming cost expensive. One promising solution to reduce network cost is to build optical circuit switched DCNs. Compared to electrical switches, optical switches offer much higher bandwidth with nearly zero power consumption. However, the commercially available optical switches can only perform circuit switching and circuit reconfigurations incur non-negligible latency, making it hard to support traffic bursts. Much existing literature focused on designing optical switches with lower reconfiguration delay and relied on frequency circuit reconfigurations to handle traffic bursts, but the control-plane complexity can be daunting.

In this talk, we explore a new design principle that leads to low-frequency optical circuit switched DCNs. The key challenge is to handle traffic bursts without frequent circuit reconfigurations. We solve this challenge with robust topology optimization and routing desensitization. Our approach dramatically reduces the circuit reconfiguration frequency and thus significantly lowers the barrier of deploying optical circuit switched DCNs. Indeed, Google adopted low-frequency reconfiguration strategy in its optical circuit switched DCNs. In addition, we will also discuss two follow-up works of the optical circuit switched DCN design, i.e., capacity planning without demand information and deadlock-free routing for RDMA traffic. We hope to see a widespread adoption of optical circuit switched DCNs in the near future. 

Bio

Shizhen Zhao received the bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2010 and the Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 2015. He is currently a Tenure-Track Associate Professor with the John Hopcroft Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Before joining SJTU, he worked in Google’s Networking Team, managing Google's hyper-scale data center networks. He has published papers in top-tier conferences and journals, including NSDI, SIGMETRICS, INFOCOM, ICNP, IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TAC, etc. His current research interest is optimizing optical circuit-switched data center networks.

Host

Professor Xiaojun Lin, linx@purdue.edu

2023-04-24 08:00:00 2023-04-24 17:00:00 America/Indiana/Indianapolis Designing Easy-to-Deploy Optical Circuit Switched Data Center Networks Shizhen Zhao Associate Professor John Hopcroft Center Shanghai Jiao Tong University 10:30 am