Nathan Farrington PhD Candidate University of California, San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering 9500 Gilman Drive, M/C 0404 La Jolla, CA 92093-0404 My email username is farrington and my mail server is cs.ucsd.edu.

Research

My research is focused on improving the cost, performance, power efficiency, scalability, and manageability of data center networks. My advisor is Amin Vahdat and I am part of the sysnet research group.

Publications

2010

Helios: A Hybrid Electrical/Optical Switch Architecture for Modular Data Centers
Nathan Farrington, George Porter, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Hamid Bazzaz, Vikram Subramanya, Yeshaiahu Fainman, George Papen, and Amin Vahdat
ACM SIGCOMM, New Delhi, India, August 2010 (PDF) (BibTeX)

Scale Out Networking in the Data Center
Amin Vahdat, Mohammad Al-Fares, Nathan Farrington, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, George Porter, and Sivasankar Radhakrishnan
IEEE Micro, July/August 2010 (to appear)

Report on WREN 2009 -- Workshop: Research on Enterprise Networking
Nathan Farrington, Nikhil Handigol, Christoph Mayer, Kok-Kiong Yap, and Jeffrey C. Mogul
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR), January 2010 (PDF) (BibTeX)

This is a collection of paper summaries and transciptions from the first WREN workshop.

2009

Data Center Switch Architecture in the Age of Merchant Silicon
Nathan Farrington, Erik Rubow, and Amin Vahdat
IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects, New York, August 2009 (PDF) (Slides) (BibTeX)

One of the primary reasons for low server utilization in data centers is that the data center network is oversubscribed (underprovisioned). This is necessary due to the non-commodity (super-expensive) nature of current commercial data center switches. This paper describes how to construct a 3,456-port 10G Ethernet switch out of "merchant silicon", i.e. switch chips designed for low-end commodity Ethernet switches. It is likely that future data center networks will be constructed almost entirely from merchant silicon, just as modern data center servers contain commodity Intel or AMD processors.

PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric
Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Andreas Pamboris, Nathan Farrington, Nelson Huang, Pardis Miri, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Vikram Subramanya, and Amin Vahdat
ACM SIGCOMM, Barcelona, Spain, August 2009 (PDF) (BibTeX)

Both Layer 2 Ethernet forwarding (learning bridge, minimum spanning tree, broadcast) and Layer 3 IP routing (longest-prefix matching, routing protocols) have problems scaling to large numbers of servers in the data center. This paper describes a new forwarding mechanism called PortLand designed specifically for data centers with much better scaling properties than either traditional Layer 2 or Layer 3 forwarding. Now, at least from a network address viewpoint, it is possible to treat all hosts in a data center as interchangable components. Additionally, a PortLand network will never contain a forwarding loop.