TechTalks from event: IEEE IPDPS 2011

Note 1: Only plenary sessions (keynotes, panels, and best papers) are accessible without requiring log-in. For other talks, you will need to log-in using the email you registered for IPDPS 2011. Note 2: Many of the talks (those without a thumbnail next to the their description below) are yet to be uploaded. Some of them were not recorded because of technical problems. We are working with the corresponding authors to upload the self-recorded versions here. We sincerely thank all authors for their efforts in making their videos available.

SESSION 5: Routing and Communication

  • On Nonblocking Folded-Clos Networks in Computer Communication Environments Authors: Xin Yuan (Florida State University, USA)
    Folded-Clos networks, also referred to as fat-trees, have been widely used as interconnects in large scale high performance computing clusters. The switching capability of such interconnects in computer communication environments, however, is not well understood. In particular, the concept of nonblocking interconnects, which is often used by system vendors, has only been studied in the telephone communication environment with the assumption of a centralized controller. Such “nonblocking”networks do not support nonblocking communications in computer communication environments where the network control is distributed. This paper theoretically analyzes the conditions for folded-Clos networks to achieve nonblocking communications in computer communication environments with various routing schemes including deterministic routing and adaptive routing, and establishes nonblocking conditions.
  • vFtree - A Fat-tree Routing Algorithm using Virtual Lanes to Alleviate Congestion Authors: Wei Lin Guay (Simula Research Laboratory, Norway); Bartosz Bogdanski (Simula Research Laboratory, Norway); Sven-Arne Reinemo (S
    It is a well known fact that multiple virtual lanes can improve performance in interconnection networks, but this knowledge has had little impact on real clusters. Currently, a large number of clusters using In?niBand is based on fat-tree topologies that can be routed deadlock-free using only one virtual lane. Consequently, all the remaining virtual lanes are left unused. In this paper we suggest an enhancement to the fat-tree algorithm that utilizes virtual lanes to improve performance when hot-spots are present. Even though the bisection bandwidth in a fat-tree is constant, hot-spots are still possible and they will degrade performance for ?ows not contributing to them due to head-of-line blocking. Such a situation may be alleviated through adaptive routing or congestion control, however, these methods are not yet readily available in In?niBand technology. To remedy this problem, we have implemented an enhanced fat-tree algorithm in OpenSM that distributes traf?c across all available virtual lanes without any con?guration needed. We evaluated the performance of the algorithm on a small cluster and did a large-scale evaluation through simulations. In a congested environment, results show that we are able to achieve throughput increases up to 38% on a small cluster and from 221% to 757% depending on the hot-spot scenario for a 648-port simulated cluster.
  • Measuring Temporal Lags in Delay-Tolerant Networks Authors: Arnaud Casteigts (University of Ottawa, Canada); Paola Flocchini (University of Ottawa, Canada); Bernard Mans (Macquarie Univer
    Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) are characterized by a possible absence of end-to-end communication routes at any instant. In most cases, however, a form of connectivity can be established over time and space. This particularity leads to consider the relevance of a given route not only in terms of hops (topological length), but also in terms of time (temporal length). The problem of measuring temporal distances between individuals in a social network was recently addressed, based on a posteriori analysis of interaction traces. This paper focuses on the distributed version of this problem, asking whether every node in a network can know precisely and in real time how out-of-date it is with respect to every other. Answering af?rmatively is simple when contacts between the nodes are punctual, using the temporal adaptation of vector clocks provided in (Kossinets et al., 2008). It becomes more dif?cult when contacts have a duration and can overlap in time with each other. We demonstrate that the problem remains solvable with arbitrarily long contacts and non-instantaneous (though invariant and known) propagation delays on edges. This is done constructively by extending the temporal adaptation of vector clocks to non-punctual causality. The second part of the paper discusses how the knowledge of temporal lags could be used as a building block to solve more concrete problems, such as the construction of foremost broadcast trees or network backbones in periodically-varying DTNs.