Keeping the Pipe Just Full

In this post, I will be discussing a paper published by the Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock, titled “Keep the Pipe Just Full, But No Fuller”. The paper’s conclusion is that it is best to keep the internet “pipe” full, without overloading it. This idea is a take on Einstein’s famous quote, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

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Flow Distribution Across ECMP Paths

ECMP is crucial for scaling and performance in modern data centers and wide-area networks, which rely on hash-based path selection. It leverages path diversity and keeps a flow’s packets on the same path, preventing reordering with useful properties like stateless operation and no reordering.

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Back to Basics: A Primer on Communication Fundamentals

Motivation

In our rapidly advancing world, communication speeds are increasing at a fast pace. Transceiver speeds have evolved from 100G to 400G, 800G, and soon even 1.6T. Similarly, Optical systems are evolving to keep up with the pace. If we dig deeper, we will discover that many concepts are shared across various domains, such as Wi-Fi, optical communications, transceivers, etc. Still, without the necessary background, It’s not easy to identify the patterns. If we have the essential knowledge, it becomes easier to understand the developments happening in the respective areas, and we can better understand the trade-offs made by the designers while designing a particular system. And that’s the motivation behind writing this post is to cover fundamental concepts which form the basis for our modern communication system and how they all relate to each other.

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Gravity Model

Motivation

I recently read Google’s latest sigcomm paper: Jupiter Evolving on their Datacenter fabric evolution. It is an excellent paper with tons of good information, and the depth and width show what an engineering thought process should look like. The central theme talks about the challenges faced with deploying and scaling Clos fabrics and how they have evolved by replacing the spine layer with OCS that allows the blocks to be directly connected, calling it Direct connect topology.

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