Non‐minimal adaptive routing based on explicit congestion notifications

Summary Low‐diameter networks require non‐minimal adaptive routing to deal with varying traffic characteristics and avoid pathological performance. Such routing is based on local estimations of network congestion, based on link‐level flow control credits. Dragonfly networks based on the extensions of commodity Ethernet networks using OpenFlow have been proposed for large HPC deployments with low power consumption. However, this network technology does not implement credit‐based flow control. This work explores a range of routing solutions based on exploiting explicit congestion notification messages (in particular, 802.1Qau) to adapt the number of packets using non‐minimal paths. The design (denoted QCN‐Switch) associates a probability value to each output port. This value is updated to reflect downstream congestion and used to statistically divert traffic away from congested areas when the load is uneven, as in the case of adversarial traffic. A feedback comparison variant is designed to separate the cases of uniform traffic at saturation and adversarial traffic at low loads. Evaluation results show that QCN‐Switch is a competitive design for both the uniform traffic and adversarial traffic. Furthermore, it is able to react to changes in traffic conditions in 0.4 ms or less. A sensitivity analysis identifies the best configuration and shows its performance trade‐offs.