DIABLO: A Warehouse-Scale Computer Network Simulator using FPGAs

Abstract

Motivated by rapid software and hardware innovation in warehouse-scale computing (WSC), we visit the problem of warehouse-scale network design evaluation. A WSC is composed of about 30 arrays or clusters, each of which contains about 3000 servers, leading to a total of about 100,000 servers per WSC. We found many prior experiments have been conducted on relatively small physical testbeds, and they often assume the workload is static and that computations are only loosely coupled with the adaptive networking stack. We present a novel and cost-efficient FPGAbased evaluation methodology, called Datacenter-In-A-Box at LOw cost (DIABLO), which treats arrays as whole computers with tightly integrated hardware and software. We have built a 3,000-node prototype running the full WSC software stack. Using our prototype, we have successfully reproduced a few WSC phenomena, such as TCP Incast and memcached request latency long tail, and found that results do indeed change with both scale and with version of the full software stack.