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Distributed machine learning (DML) technology makes it possible to train large neural networks in a reasonable amount of time. Meanwhile, as the computing power grows much faster than network capacity, network communication has gradually become the bottleneck of DML. Current multi-tenant GPU clusters face network contention caused by hash-collision problem which not only further increases the overhead of communication, but also creates unfairness and affects the user experience. In this paper, we firstly analyse how network contention affects the training time in a cluster with 32 NVIDIA V100 GPUs. Then we propose vClos to eliminate network contention by jointly optimizing network topology and communication pattern in distributed training. An OCS-vClos which introduces a layer of optical circuit switches (OCSs) in the leaf-spine network is also proposed to reduce potential network resource fragmentation caused by resource allocation strategy in vClos. Testbed experiments and real-trace-based large-scale simulations are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of vClos over existing network resource scheduling strategies.

Recent years have witnessed a widespread adoption of containers. While containers simplify and accelerate application development, existing container network technologies either incur significant overhead, which hurts performance for distributed applications, or lose flexibility or compatibility, which hinders the widespread deployment in production. We carefully analyze the kernel data path of an overlay network, quantifying the time consumed by each segment of the data path and identifying the \emph{extra overhead} in an overlay network compared to bare metal. We observe that this extra overhead generates repetitive results among packets, which inspires us to introduce caches within an overlay network. We design and implement ONCache (\textbf{O}verlay \textbf{N}etwork \textbf{Cache}), a cache-based container overlay network, to eliminate the extra overhead while maintaining flexibility and compatibility. We implement ONCache using the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) with only 524 lines of code, and integrate it as a plugin of Antrea. With ONCache, containers attain networking performance akin to that of bare metal. Compared to the standard overlay networks, ONCache improves throughput and request-response transaction rate by 12\% and 36\% for TCP (20\% and 34\% for UDP), respectively, while significantly reducing per-packet CPU overhead. Popular distributed applications also benefit from ONCache.