FastLane

Abstract

The drive towards richer and more interactive web content places increasingly stringent requirements on datacenter network performance. Applications running atop these networks typically partition an incoming query into multiple subqueries, and generate the final result by aggregating the responses for these subqueries. As a result, a large fraction --- as high as 80% --- of the network flows in such workloads are short and latency-sensitive. The speed with which existing networks respond to packet drops limits their ability to meet high-percentile flow completion time SLOs. Indirect notifications indicating packet drops (e.g., duplicates in an end-to-end acknowledgement sequence) are an important limitation to the agility of response to packet drops.