Moving past TCP in the data center, part 1

Leaving legacy protocols behind, or at least complementing them with newer, domain-specific protocols, is sometimes the best option for advancing compute systems. We just experienced this with NVMe "replacing" legacy storage protocols SATA and SAS for better price/performance.

Many distributed systems (not just in the datacenter) communicate better via short messages rather than one big stream of data. Homa as a new reliable, rapid request-response protocol may demonstrate its benefits: Lower (tail) latencies, less burdon on the CPUs and higher utilization of network infrastructure are interesting promises.

Anyone else interested in looking closer at this?