RoCELet: Host-Based Flowlet Load Balancing for RoCE

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is becoming a popular high-speed networking technology. It uses kernel bypass and zero copy to achieve high throughput and low latency with little CPU overhead. However, standard RoCE transmission uses Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) for load balancing, which can result in lower transmission performance due to hash conflicts. Meanwhile, it has been verified that, unlike TCP, the unique retransmission mode and flow characteristics of RoCE make previous load balancing algorithms not well applied to RoCE. In this paper, we introduce RoCELet, a load balancing algorithm for RoCE. It achieves fine-grained RoCE load balancing by actively generating flowlets, effectively utilizing the rich end-to-end paths in the data center. We implement a prototype based on DPDK and evaluate it through small-scale testbed experiments and large-scale simulations. Our results show that compared to state-of-the-art load balancing algorithms, RoCELet optimizes 48.2% and 16.4% in average FCT and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$99^{th}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-ile FCT, respectively.