RDON: a rack-scale disaggregated data center network based on a distributed fast optical switch

Abstract

Aiming to solve the low utilization and high operational cost in current data centers and the diversified resource requirements for different application types, we propose and investigate what we believe to be a novel rack-scale disaggregated optical data center network (RDON). Different types of hardware resources (i.e., CPU, memory, and storage) are deployed in standalone resource pools of the RDON. The RDON architecture encompasses nanosecond distributed fast optical switches for the low latency and high bandwidth interconnects between the computing and memory nodes, while electrical packet switches are utilized to support the traffic of latency insensitivity and low bandwidth between memory nodes and storage nodes. By replacing the onboard data bus with a network interconnection, RDON architecture can provide a fine granularity hardware resource and relieve the constraints of server-centric architecture. To assess the performance of the RDON under realistic scenarios, statistics of diverse applications are captured from the data center lab. The RDON is modeled based on the OMNeT++ discrete event simulator and compared with the server-centric architecture. Numerical results show that the performance of the RDON is closely coupled with the type of deployed application. Compared to the server-centric architecture, the RDON can achieve up to 2.44 × faster running time when running a single application, whereas at most 2.25 × is the fastest running time under coexisting diverse types of applications. Finally, the analysis of costs and power consumption show that, with respect to server-centric architecture, the RDON requires 21.5% extra capital cost but 46.7% less power consumption.