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It's Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter

2022/10/03 by John Ousterhout, John K. Ousterhout, Ousterhout, John · 9 voices
Computer Science · #Software System Performance and Reliability #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #Cloud Computing and Resource Management

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.00714

Abstract

In spite of its long and successful history, TCP is a poor transport protocol for modern datacenters. Every significant element of TCP, from its stream orientation to its expectation of in-order packet delivery, is wrong for the datacenter. It is time to recognize that TCP's problems are too fundamental and interrelated to be fixed; the only way to harness the full performance potential of modern networks is to introduce a new transport protocol into the datacenter. Homa demonstrates that it is possible to create a transport protocol that avoids all of TCP's problems. Although Homa is not API-compatible with TCP, it should be possible to bring it into widespread usage by integrating it with RPC frameworks.

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