Peregrine: An All-Layer-2 Container Computer Network

Abstract

ITRI container computer is a modular computer designed to be a building block for constructing cloud-scale data centers. Rather than using a traditional data center network architecture, which is typically based on a combination of Layer 2 switches and Layer 3 routers, ITRI containercomputer's internal interconnection fabric, called Peregrine, is specially architected to meet the scalability, fast fail-over and multi-tenancy requirements of these data centers. Peregrine is an all-Layer 2 network that is designed to support up to one million Layer 2 end points, provide quick recovery from any single network link/device failure, and incorporate dynamic load-balancing routing to make the best of all physical network links. Finally, the Peregrine architecture is implementable using only off-the-shelf commodity Ethernet switches. This paper describes the design and implementation of a fully operational Peregrine prototype, which is built on a folded Clos physical network topology, and the results and analysis of a performance evaluation study based on measurements taken on this prototype.