Department of Computer Science & Engineering

As single TCP flows approach 10 Gbps, static hash ECMP load balancing — used by routers today– does a poor job of balancing load in data centers. We describe a new load balancing algorithm, Flame, that is implementable at 480 Gbps with small memory and uses two novel mechanisms. First, Flame uses a Discounting Rate Estimator (DRE); unlike exponential averaging, DRE quickly measures bursts and yet retains memory of recent bursts. Second, Flame binds flows to hash functions and not to paths. We show Flame is more resilient and efficient than the earlier Flare scheme, and provides better load balancing and is more deployable than Hedera. Flame also allows rebalancing of flows in hardware at rapid rates. This is interesting because we show TCP experiments at 1 and 10 Gbps that demonstrate that recent Linux stacks after 2.6.14 can tolerate rebalancing once every 10 packets with negligible loss of throughput. On the other hand, Windows 2008 stacks have degraded TCP throughput if rebalancing is done more often than 1 in 32,000 packets. TITLE:: Flame: Efficient and Robust Hardware Load Balancing Flame: Efficient and Robust Hardware Load Balancing for Data Center Routers

Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2012-0980