Nan Li

Data center networking is the central infrastructure of the modern information society. However, benchmarking them is very challenging as the real-world network traffic is difficult to model, and Internet service giants treat the network traffic as confidential. Several industries have published a few publicly available network traces. However, these traces are collected from specific data center environments, e.g., applications, network topology, protocols, and hardware devices, and thus cannot be scaled to different users, underlying technologies, and varying benchmarking requirements. This article argues we should scale different data center applications and environments in designing, implementing, and evaluating data center networking benchmarking. We build DCNetBench, the first application-driven data center network benchmarking that can scale to different users, underlying technologies, and varying benchmarking requirements. The methodology is as follows. We built an emulated system that can simulate networking with different configurations. Then we run applications on the emulated systems to capture the realistic network traffic patterns; we analyze and classify these patterns to model and replay those traces. Finally, we provide an automatic benchmarking framework to support this pipeline. The evaluations on DCNetBench show its scaleability, effectiveness, and diversity for data center network benchmarking.