New way to track delay of 1 Millionth of a second

Millionths of a second can cost millions of dollars: A new way to track network delays

Computer scientists have developed an inexpensive solution for diagnosing networking delays in data center networks as short as tens of millionths of seconds. University of California, San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists presented this work on August 20, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier networking conference.

The new approach offers the possibility of diagnosing fine-grained delays—down to tens to microseconds—and packet loss as infrequent as one in a million at every router within a data center network. (One microsecond is one millionth of a second.) The solution could be implemented in today's router designs with almost zero cost in terms of router hardware and with no performance penalty. The University of California, San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists call their invention the Lossy Difference Aggregator. With this invention built into every router, a data center manager should be able to quickly pinpoint the offending router and interface that is adding extra microseconds of delay or losing even a few packets in a million, explained Levchenko.

If an investment bank's algorithmic stock trading program reacts to information on cheap stocks from an incoming market data feed just 100 microseconds earlier than the competition, it can buy millions of shares and bid up the price of the stock before its competitors' programs can react, the computer scientists say. Delays in these routers, also known as latencies, can add 100s of microseconds, potentially leading to millions of dollars in lost opportunities.