BurstBalancer: Do Less, Better Balance for Large-Scale Data Center Traffic

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems 2024-06, Vol.35 (6), p.932-949
• Main Authors: Liu, Zirui, Zhao, Yikai, Fan, Zhuochen, Yang, Tong, Li, Xiaodong, Zhang, Ruwen, Yang, Kaicheng, Jiang, Zihan, Zhong, Zheng, Huang, Yi, Liu, Cong, Hu, Jing, Xie, Gaogang, Cui, Bin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Data center networks; Data centers; Electronic systems; flowlet; L3 load balancing; Load balancing; Load management; Memory management; Network topology; Protocols; sketch; System-on-chip; Topology
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2023.3295454

Layer-3 load balancing is a key topic in the networking field. It is well acknowledged that flowlet is the most promising solution because of its good trade-off between load balance and packet reordering. However, we find its one significant limitation: it makes the forwarding paths of flows unpredictable. To address this limitation, this article presents BurstBalancer, a simple yet efficient load balancing system with a sketch, named BalanceSketch. Our design philosophy is doing less changes to keep the forwarding path of most flows fixed, which guides the design of BalanceSketch and our balance operations. We have fully implemented BurstBalancer in a small-scale testbed built with Tofino switches, and conducted both large-scale event-level (NS-2) and ESL (electronic system level) simulations. Our results show that BurstBalancer achieves 5%\sim ∼ 35% smaller FCT than LetFlow in symmetric topology and up to 30× smaller FCT in asymmetric topology, while 58× fewer flows suffer from path changing. All related codes are open-sourced at GitHub.