paper

Homa: A Receiver-Driven Low-Latency Transport Protocol Using Network Priorities (Complete Version)

arXiv:1803.09615 · doi:10.1145/3230543.3230564

Abstract

Homa is a new transport protocol for datacenter networks. It provides exceptionally low latency, especially for workloads with a high volume of very short messages, and it also supports large messages and high network utilization. Homa uses in-network priority queues to ensure low latency for short messages; priority allocation is managed dynamically by each receiver and integrated with a receiver-driven flow control mechanism. Homa also uses controlled overcommitment of receiver downlinks to ensure efficient bandwidth utilization at high load. Our implementation of Homa delivers 99th percentile round-trip times less than 15μs for short messages on a 10 Gbps network running at 80% load. These latencies are almost 100x lower than the best published measurements of an implementation. In simulations, Homa's latency is roughly equal to pFabric and significantly better than pHost, PIAS, and NDP for almost all message sizes and workloads. Homa can also sustain higher network loads than pFabric, pHost, or PIAS.

arXiv commentThis paper is an extended version of the paper on Homa that was published in ACM SIGCOMM 2018. Material had to be removed from Sections 5.1 and 5.2 to meet the SIGCOMM page restrictions; this version restores the missing material. This paper is 18 pages, plus two pages of references

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