We are honored to announce our Netdev 0x16 keynote speaker, industry and academic luminary: John Ousterhout

John is the Bosack Lerner Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University with research focuses on new software stack layers to allow datacenter applications to take advantage of communication and storage technologies with microsecond-scale latencies. Amongst his many accomplishments are a few things to note: He is author of the book "A Philosophy of Software Design"[1], co-creator of the Raft consensus protocol[2], and creator of the Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit[3]!

John says TCP is just plain wrong for modern datacenter technologies. While he acknowledges TCP's perseverance, having survived 40 years of dramatic technology changes, he thinks it's time for us to move on to a new approach that will make headway against what he calls the "datacenter tax". John will enumerate the problems that makes TCP unfit and then will describe his Homa transport protocol approach which tackles the issues with TCP alongside an evolutionary path to retiring TCP altogether.

John is one of the rare professors who code ;-> Potential grad students, are you seeing this?. In this keynote he will discuss his experience in implementing Homa in the kernel.

Oh, one last thing: He argues that it doesnt make any more sense to implement transport protocols in software - and firmly believes they should be moved to hardware. He feels we need to start rethinking the NIC architecture. Come hear his words of wisdom on this topic.

You cant possibly miss this keynote talk, folks! Come one, come all.

More details here: https://netdevconf.info/0x16/session.html?keynote-ousterhout

cheers, jamal

[1]https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732102201 [2]https://raft.github.io/ [3]https://www.tcl.tk/