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USENIX, The Advanced Computing Systems Association

NSDI '08 – Abstract

Pp. 263–277 of the Proceedings

Maelstrom: Transparent Error Correction for Lambda Networks

Mahesh Balakrishnan, Tudor Marian, Ken Birman, Hakim Weatherspoon, and Einar Vollset, Cornell University

Abstract

The global network of datacenters is emerging as an important distributed systems paradigm - commodity clusters running high-performance applications, connected by high-speed `lambda' networks across hundreds of milliseconds of network latency. Packet loss on long-haul networks can cripple application performance - a loss rate of 0.1% is sufficient to reduce TCP/IP throughput by an order of magnitude on a 1 Gbps link with 50ms latency. Maelstrom is an edge appliance that masks packet loss transparently and quickly from inter-cluster protocols, aggregating traffic for high-speed encoding and using a new Forward Error Correction scheme to handle bursty loss.
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Last changed: 11 Aug 2008 mn