Homa transport protocol: John Ousterhout to discuss a fast lane for small RPCs
cfregly · x · 2026-11-02
Stanford professor emeritus John Ousterhout — creator of Tcl/Tk and author of A Philosophy of Software Design — joins a Zoom session on Nov 2, 9–10 AM PST to discuss Homa, a transport protocol designed as a fast lane for small messages in datacenter networks.
- The problem: bulk traffic forces small RPCs to wait behind long queues, inflating tail latency
- Homa's approach: prioritize shorter messages to cut that wait
- The tradeoff: adopting Homa means a different transport and deployment work, and the AI-related benefit depends on the workload
- Homa is the one project Ousterhout still actively maintains after retiring, continuing his granular computing line of research
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