Automatic dynamic run-time optical network reservations

Optical networking may dramatically change high performance distributed computing. One reason is that optical networks can support provisioning dynamically configurable lightpaths, a form of circuit switching, through reservations. However, to use it (and all other network reservation mechanisms), the user or developer must modify the application. We present a system, VRESERVE, that automatically and dynamically creates network reservation requests based on the inferred network demands of running distributed and/or parallel applications with no modification to the application or operating system, and no input from the user or developer. Our execution model is a collection of virtual machines interconnected by an overlay network. The overlay network infers application demands, providing a dynamic run-time assessment of the application's topology and traffic load matrix. We then reserve lightpaths corresponding to the topology and use the overlay to forward virtual network traffic over them. We evaluate our system on the OMNInet network.