Measuring throughput of data center network topologies

Abstract

High throughput is a fundamental goal of network design. While myriad network topologies have been proposed to meet this goal, particularly in data center and HPC networking, a consistent and accurate method of evaluating a design's throughput performance and comparing it to past proposals is conspicuously absent. In this work, we develop a framework to benchmark the throughput of network topologies and apply this methodology to reveal insights about network structure. We show that despite being commonly used, cut-based metrics such as bisection bandwidth are the wrong metrics: they yield incorrect conclusions about the throughput performance of networks. We therefore measure flow-based throughput directly and show how to evaluate topologies with nearly-worst-case traffic matrices. We use the flow-based throughput metric to compare the throughput performance of a variety of computer networks. We have made our evaluation framework freely available to facilitate future work on design and evaluation of networks.