John Ousterhout

Bosack Lerner Professor of Computer Science / Professor Emeritus

Stanford University

John Ousterhout is the Bosack Lerner Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is author of the book "A Philosophy of Software Design", co-creator of the Raft consensus protocol, and creator of the Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit. Ousterhout received a BS degree in Physics from Yale University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and recipient of the ACM Software System Award.

Sessions (1)

TCP and RDMA are Killing Inference Throughput; Homa can Fix It

9:50 AM·Main Stage

Modern AI inferencing is shifting from monolithic requests to complex agentic workflows and disaggregated KV stores. As a result, AI network traffic is no longer just very large transfers; tiny metadata requests are becoming more and more common, and their latency has a critical impact on throughput. Unfortunately, legacy transport protocols such as TCP and RDMA perform poorly on these workloads due to poor congestion control and head-of-line blocking. This talk will discuss the problems with TCP and RDMA and provide a brief introduction to the Homa transport protocol. Homa uses receiver-driven flow control and capitalizes on priority queues in network switches to reduce short-message latency by 10x for workloads like those in AI datacenters.

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