networking

Congestion window over time showing slow start, a timeout, then the additive-increase multiplicative-decrease sawtooth

Congestion Avoidance and Control (Jacobson, 1988)

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-10-03 digest. Area: Networking / Systems. Authors: Van Jacobson (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), with Michael J. Karels (UC Berkeley) on the revised version Published: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM ‘88, Stanford, August 1988; Computer Communication Review 18(4), pp. 314–329. DOI: 10.1145/52324.52356 Why the paper still matters In October 1986 the link between Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and UC Berkeley, about 400 yards apart and three gateway hops, went from 32 kbit/s to 40 bit/s....

Queue size at the hottest MoE receiver growing exponentially near the end of the scheduling epoch under round-robin

Incast-Free MoE Rate-Based Scheduling

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-01 CS paper digest. Area: Systems / Networking. Authors: Evyatar Cohen, Jose Yallouz, Mark Silberstein, Isaac Keslassy (Technion); Alexander Shpiner (NVIDIA); Sylvia Ratnasamy, Isaac Keslassy (UC Berkeley) arXiv: 2607.26340 · PDF TL;DR Mixture-of-Experts models route each token to a small subset of experts, which turns every MoE layer into a highly skewed all-to-all communication phase across the GPU fabric....

The bi-channel paradigm: a slow reliable control path (e.g. kernel TCP) carries acks and coordination while a fast unreliable data path (e.g. DPDK, AF_XDP) carries the bulk tuples

The Bi-Channel Networking Paradigm for Database Systems in the Cloud

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-06-20 CS paper digest. Area: Databases / Systems. Authors: Georg Kreuzmayr (TigerBeetle), Muhammad El-Hindi (TUM), Benjamin Wagner (Firebolt), Tobias Ziegler (TigerBeetle), Viktor Leis (TUM) arXiv: 2606.19969 · PDF TL;DR For two decades distributed database systems treated the network as an opaque, kernel-managed pipe and the kernel TCP stack was fast enough that this abstraction was free. It isn’t anymore....

End-to-End Arguments in System Design (1984)

Seminal Paper of the Week — a foundational systems paper that quietly shapes how every distributed system you use is layered. Authors: Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, David D. Clark (MIT) Published: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2(4), November 1984. Canonical link: End-to-End Arguments in System Design (MIT) · ACM DOI 10.1145/357401.357402 TL;DR The end-to-end argument is a layering principle: a function should be implemented in a lower layer of a system only when it can be completely and correctly implemented at that layer, and when implementing it there provides a clear performance benefit over implementing it at the endpoints....

A Jane Street GB300 NVL72 cabinet with cold plates and quick-disconnect liquid lines exposed

Inside Jane Street's GP300 Training Data Center

Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames are embedded throughout. Dwarkesh Patel got an unusually concrete tour of a working AI training facility this week: Jane Street’s GB300 NVL72 cluster in Texas, guided by Ron Minsky (co-head of the technology group) and Daniel Pontecorvo (physical engineering). It’s only 16 minutes long, but it’s a dense walk through the things that actually break when you try to put modern GPU racks into a building that was never designed for them — cooling, leak detection, power balancing, and miles of copper and fiber....