In a irc channel this week, one guy posted a link about visualization latency in a data center switching network .
And it was really good video for understanding how congestion happens inside the switch infrastructure and a very original idea to overcome this problem!
I tried to get a bit more info about the video and ended in the page of that paper:
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/news/article/sigcomm_best_paper_award_for_mark_handley/
And see if there was any implementation:
https://github.com/nets-cs-pub-ro/NDP/wiki
I am not a researcher but the idea is quite original and it seems you dont need to re-invent the wheel. In the github repo even there is an example in P4. P4 is going to be big, and Barefoot has already commercial solutions about it with their tofino chip. Let’s see what Intel does with it…
Based on a continuation paper, it seems there is no much traction from the big cloud providers, and it surprises me, these guys have the muscle to make this kind of things. I always heard that hardware is very expensive to built and software is not. So there are few player willing to invest in new ideas. Everytime you hear about unicorn companies, nearly all of them are software companies.
And another paper says it needs more tuning/debugging.
I don’t know if it will successful in the future but I think it was interesting watching the video and reading about the concept.