Software-defined networking combined with distributed and parallel applications has the potential to deliver optimized application performance at runtime. In order to investigate this enhancement and design future implementation, a datacenter with a programmable topology integrated with application state is needed. Towards this goal, we introduce the Flow Optimized Route Configuration Engine (FORCE). The FORCE is an emulated datacenter testbed with a programmable interconnection controlled by an SDN controller. We also utilize Hadoop as a case study of distributed and parallel applications along with a simulated Hadoop shuffle traffic generator. The testbed provides initial experimental evidence of support to our hypothesis for future SDN research. Our experiments on the testbed show a difference in application runtime a factor of over 2.5 times on shuffle traffic for Hadoop MapReduce jobs and the potential for significant speedup in warehouse scale data centers.
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