Igeometry Podcast

In this episode of the backend engineering show I go through and discuss the Homa Protocol paper which attempts to replace TCP as a protocol in the data centers. I learned a lot from this paper, I have my criticisms of certain aspects, timestamps for topics discussed below. It appears there is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter and professor John tries to explain this path. Referenced materials mentioned in the episode Overview paper https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/replaceTcp.pdf Homa 2018 paper (Details) https://people.csail.mit.edu/alizadeh/papers/homa-sigcomm18.pdf NIC Offloading in Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_offload_engine#Support_in_Linux Curl disabling Nigel Algo https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/4732ca5724072f132876f520c8f02c7c5b654d9 0:00 Intro 3:00 The nature of networking data center 5:30 TCP Segments 7:30 There is no “Request” in TCP 12:00 What so unique about Data centers? 14:00 Message Throughput vs Data throughput 18:25 Congestion Control 22:38 Homa’s Congest