BigSwitch: A Massive-Port Data Center Switch

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "BigSwitch: A Massive-Port Data Center Switch"

By

Mr. Ye TAO


Abstract

With the accelerating raise of traffic demand of data center network 
communication, the data center switch bandwidth moves to 10 and 40 G/s or 
beyond. Due to the limited bandwidth of electrical switch architectures, 
many recent proposals turn to adopt optical technologies. However, 
existing data center optical architectures either have constrained 
port-to-port connectivity or fail to support massive ports required by 
enormous number of data center servers.

In this thesis paper, we design and implement BigSwitch, a novel data 
center switch architecture with optical devices that can achieve massive 
ports, arbitrary any-to-any connectivity with simple configurability. 
Consisting of multiple optical virtual switches, which are attached to 
electrical packet switches respectively, in a ring, BigSwitch inherits the 
benefits of low cost, power and complexity from optical data center 
network architectures and leverages commercially available optical devices 
to realize our vision of connecting the data center with one big switch. 
Our wavelength assignment algorithms help to break through previous 
optical data center architecture's any-to-any communication bottleneck and 
wavelength switching algorithms have been designed to reassign wavelength 
in terms of changes of traffic demands.

BigSwitch is designed to be a ring physically and a full-mesh logically, 
enabling 'publish-subscribe' style communications and achieving the 
aforementioned benefits. We build a fully functional BigSwitch prototype, 
and demonstrate the feasibility, performance and efficiency of our design 
through implanting and experimenting on the prototype.


Date:			Tuesday, 3 June 2014

Time:			2:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Kai Chen (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Pan Hui (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lin Gu


**** ALL are Welcome ****