The New Golden Age of Computer Networks
Thanks to Professor Xu Chenren and Professor Huang Qun for the invitation, I am very honored to have given a guest lecture for the Computer Network course at Peking University on December 12, 2022.
Abstract: Data center networks, wide area networks, and wireless networks provide the communication cornerstone for the intelligent world of Internet of Things.
Data center networks have traditionally been designed for easily parallelizable web services. But today, AI, big data, HPC are all large-scale heterogeneous parallel computing systems, which have high requirements for communication performance. The heavy software stack causes huge overhead, which requires the communication semantics of data center networks to evolve from byte streams to memory semantics including message semantics, synchronous and asynchronous remote memory access, RPC, and to achieve extreme latency and bandwidth with a combination of software and hardware. In the future, we hope to treat the data center as a computer, on the one hand, to achieve peer-to-peer direct access between heterogeneous computing and storage devices, making the data center interconnection as high-performance as the internal bus of the host; on the other hand, to make distributed system programming as convenient as single-machine programming through Serverless.
Large-scale live streaming and short video on-demand, real-time audio and video communication and other applications pose new challenges to the stability of wide area network transmission. Internet giants have built their own global acceleration networks and designed new transport protocols such as QUIC to achieve a high-quality user experience. In addition, due to the low energy cost in the western part of our country, the strategy of “computing in the east and calculating in the west” has become a national strategy. Through Regionless scheduling, we can achieve a “nationwide integrated large data center”.
Seamless collaboration of intelligent terminals such as mobile phones, PCs, wearable devices, smart homes, smart cars, and industrial Internet applications such as 5G to B all require stable low latency and high bandwidth, which requires wireless protocol stack optimization, and even wireless memory semantics to support Gbps-level bandwidth. In addition, through the “distributed super terminal” programming framework of HarmonyOS, more closely distributed collaboration can be enabled to achieve seamless data and service flow.
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