Hasnain says:

Pretty good read on systems research and one person’s journey through their PhD.

“Although eRPC builds on top of many research results, I could have in theory built eRPC in my first year. For several years, I mistakenly—but for good reason—believed that RDMA and/or lossless networks were necessary for good performance. I and other researchers did not consider end-to-end designs that do not rely on in-network support because we believed that such designs would not perform well, in part because we had not found all the required optimizations. In the end, we re-discovered an essential lesson from the end-to-end arguments paper: “Using performance to justify placing functions in a low-level subsystem must be done carefully. Sometimes, by examining the problem thoroughly, the same or better performance can be achieved at the high level.” “

Posted on 2021-03-05T08:29:01+0000