Amazon Thinks the Future of Data Centers Depends on a Technical Problem It Just Solved
Amazon says it recently achieved a major breakthrough in networking design—and has been quietly deploying the new technology in its data centers since late last year. The company claims it has significantly increased data speeds while reducing energy use, potentially giving the tech giant an edge as companies race to build ever-faster systems in the cloud.
The new technology hinges on a “quasi-random” design that combines elements of traditional, structured data networks with the performance advantages of more random architectures. Researchers have explored random networks for decades, but the technology has never been successfully scaled. Now, Amazon thinks it has cracked the code.
The fact that Amazon is using this in the real world is “remarkable,” says Brighten Godfrey, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an expert in networking, who was not involved in Amazon’s research. Godfrey co-authored a seminal 2012 paper on random...
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