Stardust: Divide and Conquer in the Data Center Network

Abstract

Building scalable data centers, and network devices that fit within these data centers, has become increasingly hard. With modern switches pushing at the boundary of manufacturing feasibility, being able to build suitable, and scalable network fabrics becomes of critical importance. We introduce Stardust, a fabric architecture for data center scale networks, inspired by network-switch systems. Stardust combines packet switches at the edge and disaggregated cell switches at the network fabric, using scheduled traffic. Stardust is a distributed solution that attends to the scale limitations of network-switch design, while also offering improved performance and power savings compared with traditional solutions. With ever-increasing networking requirements, Stardust predicts the elimination of packet switches, replaced by cell switches in the network, and smart network hardware at the hosts.