Condor: Better Topologies through Declarative Design
Venue
Sigcomm '15, Google Inc (2015)
Publication Year
2015
Authors
Brandon Schlinker, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Sean Smith, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Amin Vahdat, Minlan Yu, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Michael Rubin
BibTeX
Abstract
The design space for large, multipath datacenter networks is large and complex, and
no one design fits all purposes. Network architects must trade off many criteria to
design cost-effective, reliable, and maintainable networks, and typically cannot
explore much of the design space. We present Condor, our approach to enabling a
rapid, efficient design cycle. Condor allows architects to express their
requirements as constraints via a Topology Description Language (TDL), rather than
having to directly specify network structures. Condor then uses constraint-based
synthesis to rapidly generate candidate topologies, which can be analyzed against
multiple criteria. We show that TDL supports concise descriptions of topologies
such as fat-trees, BCube, and DCell; that we can generate known and novel variants
of fat-trees with simple changes to a TDL file; and that we can synthesize large
topologies in tens of seconds. We also show that Condor supports the daunting task
of designing multi-phase network expansions that can be carried out on live
networks.
