RGBCC: A New Congestion Control Mechanism for InfiniBand

The InfiniBand Congestion Control (IB CC) mechanism is able to reduce the negative congestion consequences in many situations. However, its effectiveness depends on a set of configurable parameters that must be adjusted by users to tackle congestion. If the parameters are not appropriately configured, IB CC could negatively impact the network performance and production jobs. Additionally, the IB CC mechanism is very sensitive to slight changes in its parameter settings and in traffic patterns. These difficulties in adjusting parameters prevent IB CC from being widely used today. In this paper we propose a new congestion control mechanism called Red and Green lights-Based Congestion Control (RGBCC). Simulation results have demonstrated that RGBCC is able to reduce the congestion consequences and can be dynamically adapted to various network topologies and traffic patterns without user intervention or parameter re-configuration. Furthermore, because RGBCC follows mostly the logic of the current IB CC mechanism, only minimal changes would be needed to the existing hardware/firmware.