Host-Assisted Transport Layer in Data Centers Using Network-Aware Rate Adjustment

Next generation applications for datacenters, such as Distributed Machine Learning (DML) and Big Data, have complex communication patterns that demand a scalable, stateless and application-aware optimal transport protocol to maximize network utilization and improve application performance. Recent transport protocols either provide limited benefits due to lack of information sharing between application and network; or implement complex stateful mechanisms to improve the application performance. In this paper, we present Omni- Transport Mechanism (Omni-TM) as a message-based congestion control protocol. Omni-TM allows exchanging message information with the network to negotiate the optimal transmission rate without maintaining a per-flow state at the switches (i.e., stateless). Omni- Tmis designed to reach maximum link capacity in one shot. Our simulation results show that Omni- Tmdemonstrates better traffic control decisions (i.e., close to zero queue length while maintaining high link utilization). Furthermore, Omni- Tmreduces Flow Completion Time (FCT) up to 45 % in a realistic workload compared to DCTCP.