SCS Seminar Talk: Ahmed Saeed

The network stack in today's operating systems is a remnant from a time when a server had a handful of cores and processed requests from a few thousand clients. It simply cannot keep up with the scale of modern servers and the requirements of modern applications. Specifically, real-time applications and high user expectations enforce strict performance requirements on the infrastructure. Further, there is a fundamental shift in the way hardware capacity scales from simply relying on Moore's law to deliver faster hardware every couple of years to leveraging parallel processing and task-specific accelerators. This talk covers innovations in three key components of the network stack.  First, I will cover my work on scalable packet scheduling in software network stacks, improving the control of traffic outgoing from large-scale servers. Second, I will move on to my work on improving overload control for servers handling microsecond-scale remote procedure calls, providing better control over incoming traffic to large-scale servers. Then, the talk covers my work on Wide Area Network (WAN) congestion control, focusing on network-assisted congestion control schemes, where end-to-end solutions fail. The talk will conclude with a discussion of plans for future research in this area. 

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