It's Time for Low Latency

The operating systems community has ignored network latency for too long. In the past, speed-of-light delays in wide area networks and unoptimized network hardware have made sub-100μs round-trip times impossible. However, in the next few years datacenters will be deployed with low-latency Ethernet. Without the burden of propagation delays in the datacenter campus and network delays in the Ethernet devices, it will be up to us to finish the job and see this benefit through to applications. We argue that OS researchers must lead the charge in rearchitecting systems to push the boundaries of lowlatency datacenter communication. 5-10μs remote procedure calls are possible in the short term – two orders of magnitude better than today. In the long term, moving the network interface on to the CPU core will make 1μs times feasible.