Internet traffic jams, meet your robot nemesis

July 20, 2013

On an 80-core computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists have built a tool that might make networks significantly faster just by coming up with better algorithms. The system, called Remy, generates its own algorithms for implementing TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), the framework used to prevent congestion on most networks. The algorithms are different from anything human developers have written, and so far they seem to work much better, according to the researchers. On one simulated network, they doubled the throughput. Remy is not designed to run on individual PCs and servers, but someday it may be used to develop better algorithms to run on those systems, said Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. For now, it’s churning out millions of possible algorithms and testing them against simulated networks to find the best possible one for a given objective. IP (Internet Protocol) networks don’t dictate how fast each attached computer sends out packets or whether they keep transmitting after the network has become congested. Instead, each system makes its own decisions using some implementation of the TCP framework. Each version of TCP uses its own algorithm to determine how best to act in different conditions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2044794/internet-traffic-jams-meet-your-robot-nemesis.html#tk.rss_all