Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/914030/

At the end of our earlier article on John
Ousterhout’s talk at Netdev 0x16, he had concluded
that TCP was unsuitable for data-center environments for a variety of
reasons. He also argued that there was no way to repair TCP so that it
could serve the needs of data-center networking. In order for software to
be able
to use the full potential of today’s networking hardware, TCP needs to be
replaced with a protocol that is different in almost every way, he said.
The second
half of the talk covered the Homa
transport protocol that he and others at Stanford have been working on
as a possible replacement for TCP in the data center.