MIT May Have Just Solved All Your Data Center Network Lag Issues

alphadogg (971356) writes A group of MIT researchers say they've invented a new technology that should all but eliminate queue length in data center networking. The technology will be fully described in a paper presented at the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication. According to MIT, the paper will detail a system — dubbed Fastpass — that uses a centralized arbiter to analyze network traffic holistically and make routing decisions based on that analysis, in contrast to the more decentralized protocols common today. Experimentation done in Facebook data centers shows that a Fastpass arbiter with just eight cores can be used to manage a network transmitting 2.2 terabits of data per second, according to the researchers.

scalability?

[p25r1]

Good idea, however, its main problem is that it only scales up to a couple of racks and to scale to anything larger it will probably have to sacrifice the zero-queue design principle that it argues for...

Great! Another single point-of-failure...

[gweihir]

This is a really bad idea. No need to elaborate further.

Re:scalability?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: “This paper is not intended to show that you can build this in the world’s largest data centers today,” said Balakrishnan. “But the question as to whether a more scalable centralized system can be built, we think the answer is yes.”