Networking

Authors: Michael Marty, Marc de Kruijf, Jacob Adriaens, Christopher Alfeld, Sean Bauer, Carlo Contavalli, Michael Dalton, Nandita Dukkipati, William C. Evans, Steve Gribble, Nicholas Kidd, Roman Kononov, Gautam Kumar, Carl Mauer, Emily Musick, Lena Olson, Erik Rubow, Michael Ryan, Kevin Springborn, Paul Turner, Valas Valancius, Xi Wang, and Amin Vahdat, Google, Inc. Abstract: This paper presents our design and experience with a microkernel-inspired approach to host networking called Snap. Snap is a userspace networking system that supports Google’s rapidly evolving needs with flexible modules that implement a range of network functions, including edge packet switching, virtualization for our cloud platform, traffic shaping policy enforcement, and a high-performance reliable messaging and RDMA-like service....

Authors: Yang Zhou, Harvard University; Hassan M. G. Wassel, Google; Sihang Liu, University of Virginia; Jiaqi Gao and James Mickens, Harvard University; Minlan Yu, Harvard University and Google; Chris Kennelly, Paul Turner, and David E. Culler, Google; Henry M. Levy, University of Washington and Google; Amin Vahdat, Google Abstract: Far memory systems allow an application to transparently access local memory as well as memory belonging to remote machines. Fault tolerance is a critical property of any practical approach for far memory, since machine failures (both planned and unplanned) are endemic in datacenters....

Authors: Abdullah Alomar, Pouya Hamadanian, Arash Nasr-Esfahany, Anish Agarwal, Mohammad Alizadeh, and Devavrat Shah, MIT Abstract: We present CausalSim, a causal framework for unbiased trace-driven simulation. Current trace-driven simulators assume that the interventions being simulated (e.g., a new algorithm) would not affect the validity of the traces. However, real-world traces are often biased by the choices algorithms make during trace collection, and hence replaying traces under an intervention may lead to incorrect results....

Authors: Ali Najafi, Meta; Michael Wei, VMware Research Abstract: High performance, strongly consistent applications are beginning to require scalable sub-microsecond clock synchronization. State-of-the-art clock synchronization focuses on improving accuracy or frequency of synchronization, ignoring the properties of the local clock: lost of connectivity to the remote clock means synchronization failure. Our system, Graham, leverages the fact that the local clock still keeps time even when connectivity is lost and builds a failure model using the characteristics of the local clock and the desired synchronization accuracy....

Authors: Paras Jain, Sam Kumar, Sarah Wooders, Shishir G. Patil, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley Abstract: Cloud applications are increasingly distributing data across multiple regions and cloud providers. Unfortunately, widearea bulk data transfers are often slow, bottlenecking applications. We demonstrate that it is possible to significantly improve inter-region cloud bulk transfer throughput by adapting network overlays to the cloud setting—that is, by routing data through indirect paths at the application layer....