SIGCOMM 2020 - Swift: Delay is Simple and Effective for Congestion Control in the Datacenter

Explore a conference talk from SIGCOMM 2020 that delves into Swift, a novel congestion control mechanism designed for datacenter networks. Learn about the key design aspects of Swift, which utilizes delay as a simple and effective approach to manage network congestion. Discover how Swift compares to other congestion control algorithms like DC TCP and GCN, and understand its deployment process. Gain insights into the fundamental problem Swift addresses, future work directions, and how it simplifies congestion control. Examine topics such as artificial delay inflation, initial window settings, handling stale information, and event growth proportional to measured delay. The talk also covers scaling limits, reverse path congestion, and potential alternatives to Swift. Engage with the Q&A session to deepen your understanding of Swift's implementation in RDMA environments, CPU usage concerns, and its overall impact on datacenter network performance.

Introduction
Key Design Aspects
Deploying Swift
Conclusions
Questions
Remarks
What is the fundamental problem
Future work directions
Simplifying congestion control
Why is Swift better than DC TCP or GCN
How to deal with artificial delay inflation
What is the initial window
What about stale information
Event growth and decrease proportional to measured delay
Do you use Swift for congestion control
Is burning CPU to run congestion control and issue for RDMA
Scaling limits
Reverse path congestion
Alternatives to Swift