Efficient routing and reconfiguration in virtualized HPC environments with vSwitch‐enabled lossless networks

Abstract

To meet the demands of communication-intensive workloads in the cloud, virtual machines (VMs) should utilize low overhead network communication paradigms. In general, such paradigms enable VMs to directly communicate with the hardware by means of a passthrough technology like Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). However, when passthrough-based virtualization is coupled with lossless interconnection networks, live migrations introduce scalability challenges due to the substantial network reconfiguration overhead. With these challenges in mind, we proposed a virtual switch (vSwitch) SR-IOV architecture for InfiniBand in our previous work titled "Towards the InfiniBand SR-IOV vSwitch Architecture". In this paper, we first suggest solutions to rectify the space-domain scalability issues that are present in vSwitch-enabled subnets as a result of the VMs using dedicated layer-two addresses. Then, we discuss routing strategies for virtualized environments using vSwitches and present a routing algorithm for Fat-Trees. We also present a reconfiguration method that minimizes imposed reconfiguration overhead on Fat-Trees.We perform an extensive evaluation of our prototype algorithms, and as vSwitch-enabled hardware does not yet exist, we deduce from empirical observations by emulating vSwitches with existing hardware, as well as large-scale simulations. Our results show significant reduction in the reconfiguration times as route recalculations can be eliminated, and for certain scenarios, the number of reconfiguration subnet management packets sent to switches is reduced from several hundred thousand down to a single one without degrading the routing quality.

Trends in High‐Performance Interconnection Networks in the Exascale and Big‐Data Era (HiPINEB 2017)

“…Andujar et al present how to build a 5DT torus network using a specific commercial 6‐port network card (EXTOLL) to interconnect the system nodes. Tasoulas et al suggest solutions to rectify the space‐domain scalability issues that are present in vSwitch‐enabled subnets as a result of the VMs using dedicated layer‐two addresses, also discussing routing strategies for virtualized environments using vSwitches and presenting a routing algorithm for Fat‐Trees. Finally, Yébenes et al propose a combined mechanism to provide Slim Fly network with both non‐minimal routing and queuing schemes by using several virtual networks to guarantee deadlock freedom.…”