Yosemite: Efficient scheduling of weighted coflows in data centers

Recently, coflow has been proposed as a new abstraction to capture the communication patterns in a rich set of data parallel applications in data centers. Coflows effectively model the application-level semantics of network resource usage, so high-level optimization goals, such as reducing the transfer latency of applications, can be better achieved by taking coflows as the basic elements in network resource allocation or scheduling. Although efficient coflow scheduling methods have been studied, in this paper, we propose to schedule weighted coflows as a further step in this direction, where weights are used to express the emergences or priorities of different coflows or their corresponding applications. We design an information-agnostic online algorithm to dynamically schedule coflows according to their weights and the instantaneous network condition. Then We implement the algorithm in a scheduling system named Yosemite. Our evaluation results show that, compared to the latest information-agnostic coflow scheduling algorithms, Yosemite can reduce more than 40% of the WCCT (Weighted Coflow Completion Time), and more than 30% of the completion time for coflows with above-the-average level of emergence. It even outperforms the most efficient clairvoyant coflow scheduling method by reducing around 30% WCCT, and 25%∼30% of the completion time for coflows with above-the-average emergence, respectively.