CODA: Toward Automatically Identifying and Scheduling Coflows in the Dark

Leveraging application-level requirements using coflows has recently been shown to improve application-level communication performance in data-parallel clusters. However, existing coflow-based solutions rely on modifying applications to extract coflows, making them inapplicable to many practical scenarios. In this paper, we present CODA, a first attempt at automatically identifying and scheduling coflows without any application-level modifications. We employ an incremental clustering algorithm to perform fast, application-transparent coflow identification and complement it by proposing an error-tolerant coflow scheduler to mitigate occasional identification errors. Testbed experiments and large-scale simulations with production workloads show that CODA can identify coflows with over 90% accuracy, and its scheduler is robust to inaccuracies, enabling communication stages to complete 2.4x (5.1x) faster on average (95-th percentile) compared to per-flow mechanisms. Overall, CODA's performance is comparable to that of solutions requiring application modifications.