In many supercomputing applications, high data reference locality (HDL) allows hardware and software designers to reduce the impact of long data access latency through caching and migration techniques. Other applications (e.g., cryptography, data mining) exhibit low data reference locality (LDL), forcing system designers to pursue minimum data access latency using non-traditional techniques. Th...

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 Ether...

Low latency processing is usually a goal in real-time audio applications; however, it is not clear how little latency is to be considered low enough. We discuss currently available experimental data on human perception and argue that somewhat high latencies (around 20–30ms) are probably perfectly acceptable for typical musical applications. We also argue that it should be possible to accept var...

Synchronization between independently clocked regions in a high performance system is often subject to latencies of more than one clock cycle. We show how the latency can be reduced significantly, typically to half the number of clock cycles required for high reliability, by speculating that a long synchronization time is not required. The small number of synchronization metastability times lon...