A new proposal to deal with congestion in InfiniBand-based fat-trees

摘要

The overall performance of High-Performance Computing applications may depend largely on the performance achieved by the network interconnecting the end-nodes; thus high-speed interconnect technologies like InfiniBand are used to provide high throughput and low latency. Nevertheless, network performance may be degraded due to congestion; thus using techniques to deal with the problems derived from congestion has become practically mandatory. In this paper we propose a straightforward congestion-management method suitable for fat-tree topologies built from InfiniBand components. Our proposal is based on a traffic-flow-to-service-level mapping that prevents, as much as possible with the resources available in current InfiniBand components (basically Virtual Lanes), the negative impact of the two most common problems derived from congestion: head-of-line blocking and buffer-hogging. We also provide a mathematical approach to analyze the efficiency of our proposal and several ones, by means of a set of analytical metrics. In certain traffic scenarios, we observe up to a 68％ of the ideal performance gain that could be achieved in HoL-blocking and buffer-hogging prevention.