Harmony: A Congestion-free Datacenter Architecture

Explore a groundbreaking datacenter network architecture in this 20-minute conference talk from NSDI '24. Delve into Harmony, a system designed to provide congestion-free message delivery guarantees in datacenter networks. Learn how this innovative approach eliminates unpredictable queueing, delays, and drops due to switch buffer overflows, offering bounded network delays in failure-free scenarios. Discover the theoretical and empirical evidence supporting Harmony's powerful guarantees, which come with near-zero overheads compared to traditional best-effort delivery networks. Understand how this architecture achieves a tiny additive latency overhead that diminishes with message sizes while maintaining near-optimal network utilization. Gain insights into how Harmony can potentially simplify host hardware and software design by providing more reliable network assumptions for system designers.