A Power and Performance Aware Routing Algorithm for Fat Tree Networks

Abstract

Data center energy consumption has become one of the top concerns in designing and operating large-scale data centers as cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have begun to establish more data centers in response to growing requests in clouds. In recent years, extensive efforts have been put into the research of reducing the energy consumption of servers. With the improvement of sever energy efficiency, the energy consumption of data center network, which could account for 10%-20% of the total energy expenditure of a data center, has emerged as a substantial issue. Modern data center networks often use a fat-tree network topology because of its high bisection bandwidth. In this paper, we develop a power and performance aware routing algorithm for fat tree networks that dynamically consolidate network flows and turn off unused network switches in order to reduce network energy consumption while meeting the network performance requirement.