“The transmission control protocol, or TCP, which manages traffic on the internet, was first proposed in 1974. Some version of TCP still regulates data transfer in most major data centers, the huge warehouses of servers maintained by popular websites. That’s not because TCP is perfect or because computer scientists have had trouble coming up with possible alternatives; it’s because those alternatives are too hard to test. The routers in data center networks have their traffic management protocols hardwired into them. Testing a new protocol means replacing the existing network hardware with either reconfigurable chips, which are labor-intensive to program, or software-controlled routers, which are so slow that they render large-scale testing impractical. At the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation later this month, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present a system for testing new traffic management protocols that requires no alteration to network hardware but still works at realistic speeds — 20 times as fast as networks of software-controlled routers. The system maintains a compact, efficient computational model of a network running the new protocol, with virtual data packets that bounce around among virtual routers. On the basis of the model, it schedules transmissions on the real network to produce the same traffic patterns. Researchers could thus run real web applications on the network servers and get an accurate sense of how the new protocol would affect their performance.”