First experiences with congestion control in InfiniBand hardware

In lossless interconnection networks congestion control (CC) can be an effective mechanism to achieve high performance and good utilization of network resources. Without CC, congestion in one node may grow into a congestion tree that can degrade the performance severely. This degradation can affect not only contributors to the congestion, but also throttles innocent traffic flows in the network. The InfiniBand standard describes CC functionality for detecting and resolving congestion. The InfiniBand CC concept is rich in the way that it specifies a set of parameters that can be tuned in order to achieve effective CC. There is, however, limited experience with the InfiniBand CC mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, only a few simulation studies exist. Recently, InfiniBand CC has been implemented in hardware, and in this paper we present the first experiences with such equipment. We show that the implemented InfiniBand CC mechanism effectively resolves congestion and improves fairness by solving the parking lot problem, if the CC parameters are appropriately set. By conducting extensive testing on a selection of the CC parameters, we have explored the parameter space and found a subset of parameter values that leads to efficient CC for our test scenarios. Furthermore, we show that the InfiniBand CC increases the performance of the well known HPC Challenge benchmark in a congested network.