FBICM: Efficient congestion management for high-performance networks using distributed deterministic routing

Abstract

As the number of components in cluster-based systems increases, cost and power consumption also increase. One way to reduce both problems is using smaller networks with adequate congestion management mechanisms. Recent successful proposals (RECN) eliminate the negative effects of congestion, the Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking, leaving congestion harmless. RECN relies on source-based networks architectures, where the entire route is placed at packet headers before injection. Unfortunately, distributed table-based routing is also common in cluster-based networks, being InfiniBand the most prominent example. We propose a novel congestion management technique for distributed table-based routing. The mechanism relies on additional congestion information located at routing tables. With this information HOL blocking is minimized by smartly using switch queues. Detailed memory organization and the way congestion information is updated/propagated is described. Preliminary results indicate that with modest resource requirements maximum network performance is kept regardless of congestion. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.