Next month, MIT researchers will present a breakthrough discovery that could change the way Web and mobile apps are written and help large corporations in making their datacentres more efficient.
Given that large websites have datacentres that are prone to congestion – “packets of data arriving at the same router at the same time are put in a queue, and if the queues get too long, packets can be delayed” – the new research has shown that the system can reduce network transmission queue length by over 99 percent.
In cooperation with Facebook, the MIT researchers experimented with one of the tech giants’ datacentres in an attempt to reduce the average queue length of routers. The research stated that, when traffic was most heavy, the average latency — the delay between the request for an item of information and its arrival – per request fell from 3.56 microseconds to .23 microseconds.
The model developed by the researchers – dubbed MIT Fastpass – replaces the standard decentralised networking model – where each node decides on its own when, where, and how to send data – to a centralized model called “arbiter” to decide “which nodes in the network may send data to which others during which periods of time.”
As ZDNet report, the research indicates:
“a single 8-core arbiter machine could handle 2.2 terabits of data per second, which, according to their announcement, equates to 2,000-gigabit connections running at full speed. The belief is that this could scale to a network of as many as 1,000 switches.”
It is believed that the Fastpass software will be released as open source, although the researches emphasised that it’s not a production-ready code. More information on the research will be presented at the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication this August.
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(Image Credit: Claus Rebler)
