Karsten and his co-author, Computer Science grad student Peter Cai, realized that the way that data centres were processing network traffic was inefficient and devised a small change to make it far more efficient.
Karsten and his co-author, Computer Science grad student Peter Cai, realized that the way that data centres were processing network traffic was inefficient and devised a small change to make it far more efficient.
“We didn’t add anything,” Karsten said. “We just rearranged what is done when, which leads to a much better usage of the data centre’s CPU caches. It’s kind of like rearranging the pipeline at a manufacturing plant, so that you don’t have people running around all the time.”
Karsten teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly, to develop a small section of code – approximately 30 lines – that would improve Linux’s network traffic processing. If adopted, the new method could reduce the energy consumption of important data centre operations by as much as 30 per cent, Karsten said.
Read More: University of Waterloo
Waterloo computer science professor Martin Karsten (Photo Credit: University of Waterloo)
