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SCautz: a high performance and fault-tolerant datacenter network for modular datacenters

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Abstract

Modular datacenters (MDCs) use shipping containers, encapsulating thousands of servers, as large pluggable building blocks for mega datacenters. The MDC’s “service-free” model poses stricter demand on fault-tolerance of the modular datacenter network (MDCN). Based on the “scale-out” principle, in this paper we propose SCautz, a novel hybrid intra-container network for MDCs. SCautz comprises a base Kautz topology, created by interconnecting servers, and a small number of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) switches. Moreover, each switch connects a specific number of servers forming “clusters”, which, as logical nodes, form multiple higher-level logical Kautz structures. SCautz’s hybrid structure has several advantages. First, it supports multiple running modes for the MDC, while its full structure increases network capacity twofold. Second, it retains the throughput for processing one-to-x traffic in the presence of failures. Finally, it achieves much more graceful network performance degradation than computation and storage capacity do. Results from theoretical analysis and simulations show that SCautz is more viable for intra-container networks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Lab for Parallel and Distributed Processing, School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Feng Huang, XiCheng Lu, DongSheng Li & YiMing Zhang

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  1. Feng Huang
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  2. XiCheng Lu
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  3. DongSheng Li
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  4. YiMing Zhang
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Correspondence to Feng Huang.

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Huang, F., Lu, X., Li, D. et al. SCautz: a high performance and fault-tolerant datacenter network for modular datacenters. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 55, 1493–1508 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-012-4610-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-012-4610-y

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