Performance analysis and improvement of InfiniBand networks. Modelling and effective Quality-of-Service mechanisms for interconnection networks in cluster computing systems.

Abstract

The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) network has been proposed as a new industrial standard with high-bandwidth and low-latency suitable for constructing high-performance interconnected cluster computing systems. This architecture replaces the traditional bus-based interconnection with a switch-based network for the server Input-Output (I/O) and inter-processor communications. The efficient Quality-of-Service (QoS) mechanism is fundamental to ensure the import at QoS metrics, such as maximum throughput and minimum latency, leaving aside other aspects like guarantee to reduce the delay, blocking probability, and mean queue length, etc. Performance modelling and analysis has been and continues to be of great theoretical and practical importance in the design and development of communication networks. This thesis aims to investigate efficient and cost-effective QoS mechanisms for performance analysis and improvement of InfiniBand networks in cluster-based computing systems. Firstly, a rate-based source-response link-by-link admission and congestion control function with improved Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) packet marking scheme is developed. This function adopts the rate control to reduce congestion of multiple-class traffic. Secondly, a credit-based flow control scheme is presented to reduce the mean queue length, throughput and response time of the system. In order to evaluate the performance of this scheme, a new queueing network model is developed. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that these two schemes are quite effective and suitable for InfiniBand networks. Finally, to obtain a thorough and deep understanding of the performance attributes of InfiniBand Architecture network, two efficient threshold function flow control mechanisms are proposed to enhance the QoS of InfiniBand networks; one is Entry Threshold that sets the threshold for each entry in the arbitration table, and other is Arrival Job Threshold that sets the threshold based on the number of jobs in each Virtual Lane. Furthermore, the principle of Maximum Entropy is adopted to analyse these two new mechanisms with the Generalized Exponential (GE)-Type distribution for modelling the inter-arrival times and service times of the input traffic. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to validate the accuracy of the analytical models.