Stanford Professor Emeritus Proposes Homa Protocol To Replace TCP In AI Data Centers
John Ousterhout, a Stanford University professor emeritus, is advocating for Homa, a transport protocol he argues is better suited to AI-oriented data centers than TCP. Homa processes short messages preferentially to hold down latency, and it can run alongside existing TCP. Its research traces to a 2018 paper by Behnam Montazeri, Ousterhout and others, and it assumes RPC-style communication.