NRG: A Network Perspective on Applications' Performance.

Running an application in a data center, users have an important goal: performance. Even though mismatched application requirements and network resource assignments can lead to significant performance loss, the understanding of dynamic networking effects on data center applications' performance is still limited. In this paper we present NRG, an open source toolset that enables reproducible experimentation and provides a networking perspective on applications' performance. NRG is a portable and programmable solution operating at line rate, and enabling users to recreate data center network conditions as a black box within controlled, small-scale experimentation environments. We demonstrate the potential of NRG to solve performance issues and provide insights on several applications.