A Comparative Study of SDN and Adaptive Routing on
Dragonfly Networks
SessionPerformance Analysis
Event Type
Paper
Performance
TimeThursday, November 16th11am -
11:30am
Location402-403-404
DescriptionThe OpenFlow-style Software Defined Networking (SDN)
technology has shown promising performance in data
centers and campus networks; and the HPC community is
significantly interested in adopting the SDN technology.
However, while OpenFlow-style SDN allows dynamic
per-flow resource management using a global network
view, it does not support adaptive routing, which is
widely used in HPC systems. This gives rise to the
question whether SDN can achieve the performance that
HPC systems expect with adaptive routing. In this work,
we investigate possible methods to apply the SDN
technology on the current generation HPC interconnects
with the Dragonfly topology, and compare the performance
of SDN with that of adaptive routing. Our results
indicate that adaptive routing results in higher
performance than SDN when both have similar resource
allocation for a given traffic condition. However, SDN
can use the global network view to compete with adaptive
routing by allocating network resources more
effectively.
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