Sibyl: a Framework for Evaluating the Implementation of Routing Protocols in Fat-Trees

• Main Authors: Caiazzi, Tommaso, Scazzariello, Mariano, Alberro, Leonardo, Ariemma, Lorenzo, Castro, Alberto, Grampin, Eduardo, Battista, Giuseppe Di
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Data center; Fat-tree; Hardware; Measurement; Production; Routing; Routing protocols; Software; Testing; Topology
• ISSN: 2374-9709
• DOI: 10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789876

Several data centers adopt fat-tree topologies, where high bisection bandwidth is achieved by interconnecting commodity hardware and by using specific routing solutions. These solutions, which include protocol implementations and configurations, are difficult to evaluate and test both for the density of fat-trees and for the complexity of the protocols. Also, since most issues show up only when a fault happens, it is unfeasible to perform such tests in a production environment. Additionally, the lack of standard testing procedures motivates an effort in developing solutions for such a critical task. In this paper, we propose a methodology devised for testing fat-tree routing protocol implementations. It adopts a wall-clock independent method to establish metrics, which permits normalizing the results of different routing protocol implementations independently from the execution environment. The methodology is implemented by Sibyl, a software framework developed to perform repeatable tests on arbitrary fat-tree topologies automatically. Sibyl also provides a set of tools to analyze the results and investigate implementation behaviors. We evaluate the methodology and Sibyl in three use cases. Such use cases witness a wide spectrum of situations where Sibyl is effective for analyzing, comparing, developing, and debugging routing protocol implementations.