Washington University computer scientists are among the Wild Bill Hickoks and Wyatt Earps in the Wild West of the Internet. They have patented two major inventions that should make Internet applications like e-mail, the World Wide Web and electronic commerce 10 times faster than they are now.
George Varghese, associate professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has collaborated with three Washington University colleagues in developing processes that enable the "lookup" for an Internet address to be done at the unfathomable speed of 100 nanoseconds, compared with the current average, a none-too-shabby 1.2 microseconds.
"There is a shoot-out going on in the Wild West of Internet Country, where established network vendors and a flurry of start-ups are all vying to provide the fastest Internet message forwarding rates. We've entered the shooting match," says Varghese.
If the difference between nanoseconds and microseconds seems trivial, consider that: the number of computers on the Internet is tripling every two years; the applications are increasingly more complex than e-mail and ASCII text files, now involving multimedia, audio and video as well as print data; and the speed of links (the lines that send data packets) is increasing 12 times over its present rate of 45 megabits per second, into the gigabit range.
While links are faster, routers--the hardware that routes Internet messages, much like automated processors in the U.S. Postal Service--have neither the speed nor the memory to keep up with the data, says Varghese. Today's fastest routers forward messages at a maximum rate of 100,000 to 500,000 messages a second. To keep up with communication link speeds in the gigabit range, a router has to forward five million messages per second.
If routers don't get up to speed, bottlenecks, delays and unhappy Internet customers are right around the corner, says Varghese. He presented a paper on the techniques at a fall networking conference of the Association for Computing Machinery. The processes are mathematical techniques that sort the 32-bit prefix address possibilities of Internet messages into groups that can be searched far faster than the painstaking bit-by-bit process of the past 20 years.
"There is strong commercial interest in the techniques, but we'll have to wait until the smoke clears to see how we do," says Varghese. Eight companies have signed nondisclosure agreements with Varghese and Washington University to examine the Washington University techniques. Licensing seems an imminent outcome.
Editors & Reporters: If you would like to speak with Varghese, you can reach him at 314-935-4963 (office). Please call Steve Infanti of Dick Jones Communications at 814-867-1963 if you need any assistance. We help Washington University in St. Louis with its public affairs work
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