TCP and RDMA are Killing Inference Throughput; Homa can Fix It
Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 9:20am-9:40am
- Track/room: Software Factories · Main Stage
- Speaker(s): John Ousterhout
- Session type/status: keynote · confirmed
- Track: Software Factories
- Room: Main Stage
- Session type: keynote
- Status: confirmed
Session Description
Modern AI inferencing is shifting from monolithic requests to complex agentic workflows and disaggregated KV stores. As a result, AI network traffic is no longer just very large transfers; tiny metadata requests are becoming more and more common, and their latency has a critical impact on throughput. Unfortunately, legacy transport protocols such as TCP and RDMA perform poorly on these workloads due to poor congestion control and head-of-line blocking. This talk will discuss the problems with TCP and RDMA and provide a brief introduction to the Homa transport protocol. Homa uses receiver-driven flow control and capitalizes on priority queues in network switches to reduce short-message latency by 10x for workloads like those in AI datacenters.
Media Evidence
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Evidence Graph
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People
Notes
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Synthesis
Synthesized Breakdown
TCP and RDMA are Killing Inference Throughput; Homa can Fix It ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 9:20am-9:40am - Track/room: Software Factories · Main Stage - Speaker(s): John Ousterhout - Session type/status: keynote · confirmed - Track: Software Factories - Room: Main Stage - Session type: keynote - Status: confirmed ## Session Description Modern AI inferencing is shifting from monolithic requests to complex agentic workflows and disaggregated KV stores. As a result, AI network traffic is no longer just very large transfers; tiny metadata requests are becoming more and more common, and their latency has a critical impact on throughput. Unfortunately, legacy transport protocols such as TCP and RDMA perform poorly on these workloads due to poor congestion control and head-of-line blocking. This talk will discuss the problems with TCP and RDMA and provide a brief introduction to the Homa transport protocol.
Speaker And Company Context
- John Ousterhout — Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.
Topics Covered
Derived Links And Source Material
Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.
Evidence Boundary
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