On SDN-based extreme-scale networks
Haitham A. Ghalwash, Chun-Hsi Huang · 2016
Significant research effort has been made on formulating new topologies to meet the requirements of current and future large-scale data centers. Nowadays data centers may include tens of thousands of servers, leading to an urgent need for higher bandwidth, better reliability, easier management and lower latency. This paper investigates the potential of using software-defined networks (SDNs) in Extreme scale systems, which are required for future data centers when scaling up to the Exascale level. SDN is the new trend for efficient traffic control and network management. We investigate the SDN-based behavior and performance of two widely used topologies in large-scale data centers, namely Fat-Tree and BCube, using different network scales, traffic loads and traffic patterns. Experimental results based on such performance metrics as delay, jitter and packet drops have indicated that the BCube-like topology outperforms the Fat-Tree topology in small-scale networks, while the Fat-Tree performs better as the network scales up.