Computer Scientists Scale “Layer 2” Data Center Networks to 100,000 Ports and Beyond

Radhika Niranjan Mysore (above) is a UC San Diego computer science graduate student and the first author and presenter of the SIGCOMM 2009 paper entitled "PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric.

"SIGCOMM was always a dream, and it was nice we could shoot for it," said Mysore.

Amin Vahdat (above) is the senior author on the SIGCOMM 2009 paper. Vahdat is a computer science professor at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. The SIGCOMM paper describes software created at the University of California, San Diego that the creators hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern data center networks.

A full prototype of PortLand, illustrated in Figure 1 from the paper, is currently running on a network in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.