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With the continuous enrichment of cloud services, an increasing number of applications are being deployed in data centers. These emerging applications are often communication-intensive and data-parallel, and their performance is closely related to the underlying network. With their distributed nature, the applications consist of tasks that involve a collection of parallel flows. Traditional techniques to optimize flow-level metrics are agnostic to task-level requirements, leading to poor application-level performance. In this paper, we address the heterogeneous task-level requirements of applications and propose task-aware flow scheduling. First, we model tasks' sensitivity to their completion time by utilities. Second, on the basis of Nash bargaining theory, we establish a flow scheduling model with heterogeneous utility characteristics, and analyze it using Lagrange multiplier method and KKT condition. Third, we propose two utility-aware bandwidth allocation algorithms with different practical constraints. Finally, we present Tasch, a system that enables tasks to maintain high utilities and guarantees the fairness of utilities. To demonstrate the feasibility of our system, we conduct comprehensive evaluations with realworld traffic trace. Communication stages complete up to 1.4 faster on average, task utilities increase up to 2.26 , and the fairness of tasks improves up to 8.66 using Tasch in comparison to per-flow mechanisms.

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Summary Sharing the network infrastructure, the performance of emerging distributed applications and services in data centers is directly impacted by the network. As these applications are becoming more and more demanding, it is challenging to satisfy their requirements of low latency, high throughput, and low packet loss rate simultaneously. Prior approaches typically resort to flow control or scheduling mechanisms, prioritizing flows according to their demands. However, none of the methods can solely satisfy the various demands of data center applications. Addressing this challenge, we propose tasch, a preference aware flow scheduling mechanism equipped in the software network edge (ie, end‐host networking). This mechanism utilizes multiple separate queues for flows with different preferences, which guarantees low packet delay for latency‐sensitive flows and provides bandwidth guarantees for throughput‐sensitive flows. A coordinating algorithm is presented to share the network resource among multiple queues with pareto‐optimality. tasch is implemented as a thin and plugable kernel module in Linux based hypervisors, which lies between the complicated physical network and tenants VMs. Subsequently, based on the flow traces of real‐world applications, extensive experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of network management mechanism.

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