Rethinking Multicast for Massive-Scale Platforms

A dramatic scale-up of distributed computing platforms is underway. Internet routers can contain hundreds or thousands of line cards. Cloud computing platforms may contain tens or even hundreds of thousands of machines. What is gluing all of this together? Multicast to support data replication, event streams, and coordination. Yet yesterday’s multicast protocols are poorly matched to this new generation of uses; so much so that many cloud platforms refuse to deploy multicast as such, and have instead resorted to clumsy alternatives, mapping multicast to TCP or even web services method invocations. This talk will explore inadequacies of existing protocols, early progress towards better ones, and the longer term research agenda.