An FPGA-based Simulator for Datacenter Networks

We describe an FPGA-based datacenter network simulator for researchers to rapidly experiment with O(10,000) node datacenter network architectures. Our simulation approach configures the FPGA hardware to implement abstract models of key datacenter building blocks, including all levels of switches and servers. We model servers using a complete SPARC v8 ISA implementation, enabling each node to run real node software, such as LAMP and Hadoop. Our initial implementation simulates a 64-server system and has successfully reproduced the TCP incast throughput collapse problem. When running a modern parallel benchmark, simulation performance is two-orders of magnitude faster than a popular full-system software simulator. We plan to scale up our testbed to run on multiple BEE3 FPGA boards, where each board is capable of simulating 1500 servers with switches.