Evaluation of Data Center Network Architectures

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Evaluation of Data Center Network Architectures"

by

Mr. Yang LIU


Abstract:

Large-scale data centers form the core infrastructure support for the ever 
expanding cloud based services. Thus the performance and dependability 
characteristics of data centers will have significant impact on the scalability 
of these services. In particular, the data center network needs to be agile and 
reconfigurable in order to respond quickly to ever changing application demands 
and service requirements. Significant research work has been done on designing 
the data center network architectures in order to improve the performance of 
data centers. In this paper, we present a survey of data center network design 
and architectures that have published recently. We start with a discussion on 
various representative data center network topologies, and compare them with 
respect to several properties in order to highlight their advantages and 
disadvantages. Thereafter, we discuss several routing protocols designed for 
these topologies, and compare them based on various criteria: the basic 
algorithms to establish connections, the technologies used to gain better 
performance and the mechanisms for fault-tolerance. A good understanding of the 
state-of-the-art in data center networks would enable the design of future 
architecture in order to improve performance and dependability of data centers. 
Sustainable data centers reduces the environmental impact of the IT industry. 
We discuss different proposals of sustainable data centers, and finally propose 
our own research on performance/sustainability/dependability trade-off 
evaluation.


Date:                   Friday, 28 January 2011

Time:                   4:30pm - 6:30pm

Venue:                  Room 3501
                        lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Jogesh Muppala (Supervisor)
                        Prof. Mounir Hamdi (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Gary Chan
 			Dr. Lin Gu


**** ALL are Welcome ****