Nathan Farrington  

Nathan Farrington
PhD Candidate

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.

Recent Projects

Publications

2011

Hardware Requirements for Optical Circuit Switched Data Center Networks
Nathan Farrington, Yeshaiahu Fainman, Hong Liu, George Papen, and Amin Vahdat
OFC/NFOEC, Los Angeles, March 2011 (PDF) (Slides) (BibTeX)

While working on the Helios project, we discovered that many of the optical communication devices commonly used in data center networks, such as electronic dispersion compensators (EDC) and transimpedence amplifiers (TIA), are not optimized for quickly recovering after a loss of light. However, we did find that such technology exists and future data center networks could be engineered for high performance when using optical circuit switches.

2010

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

Traditionally, local area networks, including data center networks, have been constructed using switched Ethernet. A typical 10G Ethernet switch uses 12.5W per port, and cost upwards of $500 per port or more. There is a cheaper source of bandwidth: optical circuit switching. This paper describes how we constructed a data center network using an optical circuit switch and what we had to do to achieve good performance.

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 (PDF) (BibTeX)

This is an overview paper of our recent work and a great place to start when learning about the field of data center networking. It covers: commoditization, merchant silicon, scaling Ethernet, and scheduling TCP flows.

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 transcriptions 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 interchangeable components. Additionally, a PortLand network will never contain a forwarding loop.

Before going to grad school, I worked for the Navy as a robotics research engineer.

2005

Transitioning Unmanned Ground Vehicle Research Technologies
Estrellina Pacis, H. R. Everett, Nathan Farrington, Greg Kogut, Brandon Sights, Ted Kramer, M. Thompson, David Bruemmer, Doug Few.
SPIE Proc. 5804: Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VII, Orlando, FL, March 2005

2004

Intelligent behaviors for a convoy of indoor mobile robots operating in unknown environments
Nathan Farrington, Hoa Nguyen, Narek Pezeshkian
SPIE Proc. 5609: Mobile Robots XVII, Philadelphia, PA, October 2004

Towards a Warfighter's Associate: Eliminating the Operator Control Unit
H. R. Everett, Estrellina Pacis, Greg Kogut, Nathan Farrington, S. Khurana.
SPIE Proc. 5609: Mobile Robots XVII, Philadelphia, PA, October 2004

Segway Robotic Mobility Platform
Hoa Nguyen, J. Morrell, K. Mullens, Aaron Burmeister, S. Miles, Nathan Farrington, K. Thomas, Doug Gage.
SPIE Proc. 5609: Mobile Robots XVII, Philadelphia, PA, October 2004

A Segway RMP-based robotic transport system
Hoa Nguyen, Greg Kogut, R. Barua, Aaron Burmeister, Narek Pezeshkian, D. Powell, Nathan Farrington, M. Wimmer, B. Cicchetto, C. Heng, V. Ramirez.
SPIE Proc. 5609: Mobile Robots XVII, Philadelphia, PA, October 2004

Maintaining Communication Link for Tactical Ground Robots
Hoa Nguyen, Nathan Farrington, Narek Pezeshkian.
AUVSI Unmanned Systems North America, Anaheim, CA August 2004

Enhancing Functionality and Autonomy in Man-Portable Robots
Estrellina Pacis, H. R. Everett, Nathan Farrington, David Bruemmer.
SPIE Proc. 5422: Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VI, Orlando, FL, April 2004

Maintaining Communication Link for a Robot Operating in a Hazardous Environment
Hoa Nguyen, Narek Pezeshkian, A. Gupta, Nathan Farrington.
American Nuclear Society 10th Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Remote Systems for Hazardous Environments, Gainesville, FL, March 2004