Trafc Isolation and Network Resource Sharing for Performance Control in Grids

P. Vicat-blanc Primet and J. Zeng

LIP, UMR CNRS-ENS Lyon-INRIA-UCB Lyon 5668 cole Normale Suprieure de Lyon, France {pprimet, jzeng}@ens-lyon.fr

Abstract While grids reach further to geographically separated clusters and data warehouses, grid applications pose new demands on end-to-end performance control. Data-intensive grid applications rely on the underneath network to bring together distributed computational and storage resources. From computational grids to data grids, the focus of resource utilization is shifting from computing power to network resources. This article investigates network resource sharing in grids, especially data grids. It studies trafc characteristics and quality of service(QoS) mechanisms of grid applications. A hybrid approach, which combines advance resource reservation and classical QoS differentiation, is proposed to meet grid application performance requirements. Identifying three types of resource reservation scenarios, that is, long-lived, short-lived, and exible shortlived, the article formulates optimization problem of network resource sharing. Proven NP-complete, the problem is pursued with heuristics and simulations. Keywords: grid computing, network resource sharing, optimization, heuristics.

I. I NTRODUCTION Grid computing is a promising technology that brings together geographically distributed resources (computing, visualization, storage, information). It builds a very highperformance computing environment for data-intensive and computing-intensive applications [1]. Grid applications involve multi-domain, very long distance heterogeneous networks, complex sets of network services, and local area networks belonging to independent organizations. Heterogeneous trafc ows of grids have impact on grid performance, resource utilization, and performance of individual applications. The data volume of data grids is in the order of Terabytes and will likely reach Petabytes in the near future. Transporting such enormous quantities of data among grid networks pose specic challenges on the transport protocol and control mechanisms. Variable solutions have been proposed to enhance TCP/IP protocols [2]. Techniques, such as load balancing, data caching, and data replicating, have been proposed for grid networks. Aside from bandwidth redundancies offered by the optical medium [3], optical burst switching (OBS) technology can efciently convey large data volumes. Provisioning end-to-end services with known and knowable characteristics of grids is critical. Specically, there are two major issues related to QoS enforcement of grid applications. First, the separation of elephant-like bulk data from mouselike short messages (e.g., MPI message) is important, due

to the TCP intra-fairness problem. Second, the unidirectional bulk data transfer needs to be controlled because TCP protocols reacts poorly to bulk transfer in large pipes [2]. While computational/storage resource sharing has been intensively investigated [4], the idea of incorporating network/communication resource management into grid environments has gained attention. For instance, network resource reservation [5] was proposed to be studied within the grid scope. Herein, grid middleware itself takes the network resource into account, if not from a perspective that is totally different from other applications. As proposed by Grid HighPerformance Networking (GHPN) group of Global Grid Forum (GGF), grid network service is dened based on the term of grid service; it integrates the network layer operations into grid applications. This article is associated with the Grid 5000 project [6], an experimental grid platform gathering 5000 processors over eight geographically distributed sites in France. The network infrastructure is simplied as an interconnection of LANs (i.e., grid sites) and over-provisioned WANs. The over-provisioned core can be achieved either by service level agreement among service providers, or an optical virtual private network (VPN) [6], [7]. Considering grid hosts may generate large ows through their gigabit interfaces, however, the interfaces between LAN and WAN introduce resource sharing bottleneck. This article proposes a hybrid network resource sharing approach that can be integrated, as a grid network service, into grid middleware. The rest of the article is organized as follows. Section II gives insights on grid trafc characteristics. Grid trafc classication and isolation are discussed in section III. The optimization problem of resource sharing is formulated and discussed in section IV. Section V presents the heuristics solving the problem. SectionVI includes related work. The article concludes in section VII. II. G RID TRAFFIC CHARACTERISTICS There are two major types of grid trafc [8]: grid control trafc and grid application trafc. Grid control ows carry system or application codes that have to be executed in the distributed environment, as well as re-conguration and control data for synchronization, load balancing, resource management, security, and fault tolerance. Grid application

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Table I Trafc types of grid applications. plane control ow type urgent normal background real-time real-time interactive ftp normal bulk usage synchronization resource&workload management backup Audio MPI and IPC messages interactive grids input and output data data grids delay ms s no 150ms ms s s h reliability yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes rate constraint small message and low bandwidth normal messages and normal bandwidth normal messages and low to high bandwidth small messages and low bandwidth small messages and low bandwidth small messages and low bandwidth high bandwidth very high bandwidth

data

ows convey input, output, and interprocess communication data. Three types of grid middleware and control ows with their QoS requirements can be listed as follows: urgent control trafc (e.g., alerts, status updates, synchronization) requiring low one-way delay and high priority. Normal control and management trafc (e.g., code deployment, logs reports) requiring reliability and appropriate throughput. Background management trafc (e.g., backup, updates) requiring reliability but having no time or throughput constraints. QoS requirements of grid application ows can be grouped in ve categories: Applications handling audio/video/image content requiring low packet loss, low one-way delay, and minimal delay variation. Reliability is not critical, should the application be error adaptive (e.g., FEC). MPI messages and other interprocess communication data requiring reliability and low delay. Individual task-oriented data transactions requiring data transfer reliability and maximized number of completed transactions. This low volume interactive trafc emerges with the popularity of visualization and access grids. Normal data transfer requiring reliability and quantiable throughput for input and output data. Bulk data transfer often requiring the maximized throughput. Given the rate reduction penalty introduced by lost data units, packet loss rate needs to be minimized especially for high speed transfers. Table I summarizes the characteristics of grid ows and their corresponding QoS requirements. III. F LOW AND SERVICE DIFFERENTIATION OF GRIDS Grids require appropriate and predictable network performances. Enforced QoS of heterogeneous grid ows depends on performance criteria used by service providers. As shown in Table I, grid control and data ows are separated. Moreover, grid data ows themselves are classied as delay sensitive, normal, and throughput sensitive. Apparently, simple multiplexing approaches may either have to compromise QoS guarantee, or cannot handle all QoS requirements at once. A hybrid network sharing strategy that combines the off-line advanced reservation mechanism and classical QoS differentiation is then proposed. It maps low volume, delay sensitive ows into prioritized QoS classes (for example, DiffServ expedited forwarding class), and maps normal ows into the

best-effort class. Large-volume throughput sensitive ows are isolated and handled by advance reservation. This approach has the following advantages: QoS mechanisms (e.g., classication, prioritization, shaping) [9] that have been intensively studied and deployed in network equipments (hosts and routers) can be reused. Low volume, delay sensitive trafc is protected from elephant-like ows, and elephant-like applications benet from large capacity provided by optical technologies and enhanced transport protocols [2]; Since TCP protocols behave well with normal bandwidthdelay product pipes in well-provisioned networks. Separated normal ows can take advantages of TCP/IP enhancement and adaptation. Off-line reservation has the opportunity to optimize network resource utilization for bulk data transfers. To make this approach a reality, one may adopt different strategies: APIs: As classical communication programming interfaces do not provide users the ability to specify QoS requirements when sending their data, one has to nd a way to transparently differentiate trafc. For advance reservations, the grid community starts to standardize the interface [10]. The goal is to integrate upper level reservations with transfer services, and map these reservations to network service requests. Resource provisioning: network resource is provisioned from host to host to meet various QoS requirements of grid applications. For instance, ten percent of the end-toend capacity is dedicated to delay sensitive trafc of the expedited forwarding class. Sufcient capacity is reserved in advance for bulk trafc. Best effort trafc also requires bandwidth to avoid starvation. Resource allocation: for off-line reservation, bottleneck identication and resource utilization optimization are critical. Customized algorithms running in an either centralized or distributed manner, as pursued in this article, are needed. Resource usage control: After trafc is differentiated and resource is correctly provisioned, control mechanisms are deployed in grid networks to ensure that each ow behaves well and conforms to its specications. This article investigates the resource allocation approach. The resource reservation optimization of bulk data transfers is discussed in the rest of the article.

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1 N 1

2 N

1 M core 2 2 1 N

than the capacity of its access point (i.e., the router), and the capacity of the network core is larger than the aggregated capacity of all access points. Given a set of transmission requests, an ingress point is where the trafc requires to enter the grid network from, and an egress point is where the trafc requires to leave the grid network from. These points, as depicted in Fig. 2, are where potential resource bottlenecks present. A. Resource requests

1 2 N

3 1 2 N

Fig. 1.

The grid network infrastructure.

IV. O PTIMIZATION OF NETWORK RESOURCE SHARING FOR

BULK DATA TRANSFER

A grid can be modeled as a collection of LANs (that is, grid sites) interconnected over well-provisioned WANs. As illustrated in Fig. 1, this model ts well the physical conguration of the Grid5000 network, thus making eld experiments meaningful.

Resource requests, corresponding to different application scenarios, can be long-lived, short-lived, or exible shortlived. Long-lived requests correspond to permanent or semipermanent connections between grid sites (e.g., cluster sites, storage sites), for example, a virtual grid of several hosts in a known period of time. Short-lived requests represent individual data transmission tasks, for example, a database being moved to a designated site. Flexible short-lived requests t in the scenario where grid users have a certain degree of exibility on the transmission time, and thus the transfer speed may be manipulable. Given the notation as follows:

IBM

IBM

Computers

Disks Disks

WAN

Computers Cluster Cluster

Fig. 2.

Ingress and egress points, i.e., potential bottlenecks of grids.

a set of requests R = {r1 , r2 , . . . , rK }. a set of ingress points I = {i1 , i2 , . . . , iM }, with Bin (i) as the capacity allocated to this class of trafc (i.e., bandwidth) of ingress point i I. a set of egress points E = {e1 , e2 , . . . , eN }, with Bout (e) as the capacity allocated to this class of trafc (i.e., bandwidth) of egress point e E. each long-lived request r R has a bandwidth demand bw (r). each short-lived request r R has a required transmission window of [ts (r), tf (r)], and an assigned transmission window of [(r), (r)] when accepted. each short-lived request r R has its volume vol (r) specied either in bytes or other meaningful units, the transmission limit of its attached host max .rate(r), and an assigned bandwidth ba(r) when accepted.

From the resilient overlay network (RON) to other related architectures, the overlay infrastructure is adopted to provide more control and functional exibility to the network. The edge routers of the grid network in this article are assumed to form a fully-meshed overlay. Grid network middleware, residing in these routers, controls the resource sharing and the transport of grid data. The network core is assumed to be lossless and queuing delay-free. There are M overlay routers, with N connections per site, as depicted in Fig. 2. Up to 2N (M 1) bi-directional links are attached to an overlay router, due to the fact that bulk data transfers between two points are not symmetrical. The number of connection among routers increases in the order of O(M N ). It is assumed that the network core has ample communication resources [7], the aggregated capacity of a LAN is larger

For a long-lived request r R, resource sharing constraints are stated as: i I,

rR,ingress(r)=i

bw (r) bw (r)
rR,egress(r)=e

Bin (i) Bout (e) (1)

e E,

where ingress(r) I and egress(r) E are the ingress and egress point of request r, respectively. If a short-lived request r is accepted at time (r) = t, both points of ingress(r) and egress(r) devote a fraction of their capacity, that is, ba(r), to request r from time t to time (t) = t + vol(r) . Obviously, the scheduled window of [(r), (r)] ba(r) must be included in the time window of [ts (r), tf (r)] for all requests r R.

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For short-lived request r R, therefore, resource sharing constraints are stated as: t, t, i I,
rR, ingress(r)=i, (r) t< (r)

for exible short-lived requests, that is, the degree of trading network resources, is addressed in two forms: M AXIMIZE min
rA

ba(r)

Bin (i) Bout (e),

e E,
rR, egress(r)=e, (r) t< (r)

ba(r)

M AXIMIZE
rA

ba(r) max .rate(r) ba(r) . max .rate(r)

(4) (5)

r,

vol (r) tf (r) ts (r)

ba(r)

max .rate(r)

(2)

Apparently, (4) tends to "equalize" the assigned bandwidth among requests. And (5) may have bandwidth assigned at either maximum or minimum value. V. H EURISTICS While the complexity of the optimization problem in section IV has been proven NP-complete [11], heuristics are introduced in this section. A. Long-lived requests The Long-lived request scenario is similar to classical resource provisioning, except that both network ingress and egress points are taken into consideration here. The rst algorithm sorts requests by bandwidth in a nondecreasing order (ties are broken arbitrarily), and accepts requests until there are no available resources. A request is accepted if and only if its bandwidth does not exceed the available capacity of both ingress and egress points. An rened version accepts the request that leaves the maximum amount of resources to others. Take request rk as an example. Let i = ingress(rk ), and alloc_ingress(i) be bandwidth of point i which has been taken by accepted requests (initially alloc_ingress(i) = 0). By calculating the utilization ratio of ingress point i, that is, alloc_ingress(i)+bw (k) , Bin (i) and that of the corresponding egress point, the request that results in the minimum value is accepted. The third heuristic starts from the whole set of requests (i.e., the set of accepted requests A = R), and "peels off" certain requests until a solution is found. Given P set of requests, the bw (r) an occupancy ratio dened as ratio(i) = rA,ingress(r)=i Bin (i) is calculated for all access points. If all ratios are smaller than 1, all requests are accepted. Otherwise, among requests whose ingress and egress points both have their occupancy ratio bigger than 1, the one that helps decrease the ratio the most is peeled off; those requests, either of whose ingress or egress points has a ratio bigger than 1, are scanned through in a similar manner. Detailed pseudo codes and simulation results can be found in the tech report [12]. Considering different optimization criteria as presented in section IV, original purposes of these heuristics have been met. Requests are randomly generated rather than uniformly distributed among access points; thus the achieved accept rate and utilization ratio, which are more than 50%, are rather satisfying. B. Short-lived requests Depending on the exibility of the requested transmission window, two cases apply to short-lived requests. First, the requested time window is rigid. It implies that (r) = ts (r)

where ingress(r) I and egress(r) E are the ingress and egress point of request r, respectively. B. Optimization objectives Request accept rate is important to grid service providers. Dene xk as a boolean variable; it equals 1 if and only if request rk is accepted. Thus the set of accepted requests is: A = {r R, such that xk = 1}. For both short-lived and long-lived requests, the objective function is illustrated as: M AXIMIZE |A| |R| (3)

The utilization of the shared network resource, drawn as the ratio of granted resources to total available ones, is also an important factor. For both short-lived and long-lived request, the objective function is shown as: M AXIMIZE
K k=1 1 2 M i=1

xk .bw (rk )
N e=1 scaled Bout (e)

scaled (i) + Bin

Since one request is counted twice, that is, at both ingress and egress points, a factor of 1/2 is used to "stretch" the utilization value to 1. Dened as
scaled (i) = min Bin (i), Bin rR,ingress(r)=i

bw (r)

and
scaled Bout (e) = min Bout (e), rR,egress(r)=e scaled scaled (i) and Bout (e) are adopted to rule out the possiBin bility where one access point has no requests at all, and thus the capacity of this point should be excluded when calculating resource utilization. For exible short-lived requests, moreover, the time during which they occupy the network is also of interest. Obviously, a network resource request is associated with preceding or succeeding demands on other resources, such as storage and computing power. If the request spends less time in the network, it actually relieves the timing constraints on other related resources. By trading network resources, obviously, one may gain exibility on scheduling other grid resources. As stated in (2), the exibility on time windows is actually reected by the assigned bandwidth ba(r). While still targeting at the request accept rate as in (3), the objective function

bw (r) ,

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and (r) = tf (r). Therefore, there is no manipulation on requested bandwidth. Second, the requested time window is manipulable, given that the starting time and nishing time are ts (r) + vol(r) . In other words, not violated, that is, tf (r) bw (r) the assigned bandwidth is exible. 1) Fixed time window: For a request that has stringent delivery time specied, for example, a database transmission that has storage already scheduled at its destination, its requested time windows must be met as it is. The simplest way is to schedule requests in a rst come rst serve manner, that is, follow the order of the starting time ts (r). If several requests happen to have the same starting time, the request demanding the smallest bandwidth is scheduled rst. Given requested time windows, the starting and nishing times are used as reference points for resource reservation in the second heuristic. As depicted in Figure 3, these reference points form time intervals, within which requests spans from the beginning to the end; heuristics for long-lived requests are conveniently adopted in each time interval.
r

position technique of the xed-window scenario in section VB.1. Within each time interval, the total resources are shared between requests. Since the time window of each request is exible, bandwidth assigned to each request can vary and the succeeding parts of this request is accordingly changed; this is different from heuristics in section V-B.1. Note that, bandwidth can only be increased, and assigned time windows are accordingly shortened.

Fig. 4.

Reshaping the request.

requests: time-intervals:

ts (r)

tf (r)

Fig. 3.

Decomposition of requests with time windows.

Moreover, two reservation policies are added for requests that spread over multiple time intervals. First, if the request is rejected in its rst time interval, it will be removed from the system permanently. Second, if the request gets accepted in its rst time interval, it is granted certain priority for competing with other requests in its future time intervals. At the interval of [ti , ti+1 ], the priority factor is dened as the sum of the time already allocated to the request, that is, ti ts (r), and the duration of the current interval (ti+1 ti ) over the total request duration: priority(r, [ti , ti+1 ]) = ti+1 ts (r) tf (r) ts (r)

Different from being manipulated during the scheduling process, the requests can also be re-arranged in advance. For instance, keeping their original starting time ts (r), all requests are assumed to be transmitted at their maximum capacity. Or, keeping the original nishing time tf (r), all requests are assumed to be transmitted at their maximum speed. Obviously, their requested starting and nishing times are accordingly changed. And the sharing here is solely in the time scope. The idea of reshaping a request is illustrated as in Fig. 4. This manipulation is benecial in two ways: rst, heuristics for xed window in section V-B.1 can be reused. second, grid applications, in this scenario, send data out at full speed. The trafc manipulation at the sender side is simplied. The simulations for these heuristics are undergoing. Next, all heuristics will be incorporated into network processor implementations. Answers to two questions will be pursued. First, how the sharing in time scope strategy impacts TCP protocol behaviors in data grids. Second, how much benets one can get from trading network resources for looser time constraints on other grid resources. VI. R ELATED WORK Admission control mechanisms in IP networks are well studied [9]. They are mostly done at ingress points of the network edge, or is closely coupled with path search. The work in this article looks at both access points where the trafc enters and leaves the grid network. The network topology studied here can easily incorporate with routing techniques or MPLS forwarding of the network core. Studying control mechanisms at network edge, this work is in line with the Internet philosophy of pushing the complexity to the network edge. On the perspective of resource scheduling, it pursues solutions based on the idea of what enters the network (i.e., grid WAN here) shall be able to leave the network, and thus avoiding potential packet drop within the network. This idea of "globally max-min fair" was investigated in Network Border Patrol [13].

Detailed pseudo codes and simulation results are listed in the tech report [12]. The algorithm that considers the reservation history of a request has the best performance on both accept rate and resource utilization. We have also learned that selective accept, as compared to the rst come rst serve strategy, is the key step toward better performance. 2) Flexible time window: The requested bandwidth of a short-lived request can be drawn from its volume and transmission window. The assigned bandwidth is then between this value and the maximum capacity of a grid application, as in (2). Obviously, both the assigned time window and assigned bandwidth are variable. Sharing in the space scope, in other words, sharing the bandwidth, the rst heuristic follows the time window decom-

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Advance reservation for grids has also been under intensive study. The Globus Architecture for Reservation and Allocation (GARA) introduced the idea of advance reservations and endto-end management for QoS on different type of resources (network, storage, and computing) [5]. This article further investigates the optimization of network resource sharing based on grid trafc patterns and its specic network topology. A similar advance reservation problem has also been dened and investigated in [14]. Although both targeting at resource requests with transmission time windows, this article tackles optimal resource sharing, rather than investigating the percentage of book-ahead periods and that of malleable reservations. VII. C ONCLUSIONS While grids and grid applications evolving, their performance or QoS control are more and more correlated to the transport network. From TCP protocols to resource management strategies, grids pose new requirements on networking technologies. To have a robust grid system on top of legacy networks, re-visiting existing technologies in the scope of grids is important. This article furnishes a general view on performance control of grids. The article presents a hybrid QoS strategy that combines classical QoS differentiation and advance reservation of grids. It studied the trafc patterns and QoS requirements of grids, and identied three types of network resource request scenarios. The optimization problem of network resource sharing is tackled with heuristics and simulations. Aside from integrating current heuristics into network middleware of the Grid5000 project, future work will be continued in the direction of reliving tentative hot spots in the network, that is, ingress/egress points that are heavily demanded, and in the direction of real-time resource reservation. VIII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work has been funded by the French Ministry of Education and Research, INRIA, and CNRS, via ACI GRIDs Grid5000 project and GRIPPS project. The authors would like to sincerely thank Prof. Yves Robert and Loris Marchal for working together with them on this research topic. R EFERENCES
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