Combining Congested-Flow Isolation and Injection Throttling in HPC Interconnection Networks

Existing congestion control mechanisms in interconnects can be divided into two general approaches. One is to throttle traffic injection at the sources that contribute to congestion, and the other is to isolate the congested traffic in specially designated resources. These two approaches have different, but non-overlapping weaknesses. In this paper we present in detail a method that combines injection throttling and congested-flow isolation. Through simulation studies we first demonstrate the respective flaws of the injection throttling and of flow isolation. Thereafter we show that our combined method extracts the best of both approaches in the sense that it gives fast reaction to congestion, it is scalable and it has good fairness properties with respect to the congested flows.