Practical TDMA for Datacenter Ethernet

Cloud computing is placing increasingly stringent demands on datacenter networks. Applications like MapReduce and Hadoop demand high bisection bandwidth to support their all-to-all shuffle communication phases. Conversely, Web services often rely on deep chains of relatively lightweight RPCs. While HPC vendors market niche hardware solutions, current approaches to providing high-bandwidth and low-latency communication in the datacenter exhibit significant inefficiencies on commodity Ethernet hardware. The authors propose addressing these challenges by leveraging the tightly coupled nature of the datacenter environment to apply Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA).