Scale-friendly In-network Coordination

TL;DR

This paper presents a new in-network key-value store platform implemented in P4 that significantly reduces latency and increases throughput, enhancing scalability for large-scale data center coordination.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel in-network key-value store that maintains consistency and fault-tolerance while outperforming existing solutions in latency and scalability.

Findings

Latency reduced by up to orders of magnitude

Throughput increased by up to nine times

Enhanced scalability with multiple nodes

Abstract

The programmability of modern network devices has led to innovative research in the area of in-network computing, i.e., offloading certain computations to the programmable data plane. Key-value stores, which offer coordination services for many large-scale data centres, benefited from this technological advancement. Previous research reduced the response latency of key-value requests by half through deploying the store in the programmable data plane. In this work, we identify previous design decisions that have led to increased traffic generation and latency for in-network coordination services. We have developed a new in-network key-value store platform that maintains strong consistency and fault-tolerance, while improving performance and scalability over the state-of-the-art. We have designed and implemented the platform in P4, and analysed the optimisations that unlock these performance improvements. Our evaluation shows a reduction of up to orders of magnitude in latency and significant improvements in throughput. We obtain up to nine times higher throughput for scenarios with multiple participating nodes, indicative of the superior scalability the platform can offer.