Approaching Incast Congestion with Multi-host Ethernet Controllers

The bursty many-to-one communication pattern, typical for data acquisition systems, but also present in datacenter networks, is particularly demanding for commodity TCP/IP and Ethernet technologies. We expand our study of building incast-resistant networks based on software switches running on commercial-off-the-shelf servers. In this paper we provide the estimates for costs and physical area required to build such a network. Our estimates indicate that our proposed design offers significant cost advantage over traditional solutions, but higher space utilisation. Next, we show how the latter can be improved with multi-host Ethernet controllers, as an alternative to typical network interface cards. This can also make software switching easier to adapt in datacenter as a solution for incast congestion. We confirm the capabilities for incast-avoidance by evaluating the performance of a reference platform.