Session

Tha Homa transport protocol provides significantly higher performance than TCP, particularly when considering tail latency for short messages. In order to achieve its performance benefits, both Homa’s API and its internal design are quite different from TCP. One of the most important differences is that Homa is message-oriented, whereas TCP is stream-oriented. Homa’s message orientation provides many benefits, but it also creates challenges. This talk will discuss how Homa’s message orientation makes pipelining difficult, which impacts throughput for large messages, and how the problem was solved by introducing a new approach to buffering, where user-space buffers are allocated and managed by the kernel.