Minutes
IAB Teleconference (Techchat)

2009-09-02

1. Roll-call, agenda-bash, administrivia, approval of minutes

1.1. Attendance

PRESENT
  Marcelo Bagnulo
  Ron Bonica (IESG Liaison to the IAB)
  Gonzalo Camarillo
  Stuart Cheshire
  Aaron Falk (IRTF Chair)
  Vijay Gill
  Sandy Ginoza (RFC Editor Liaison)
  Russ Housley (IETF Chair)
  John Klensin
  Olaf Kolkman (IAB Chair)
  Gregory Lebovitz
  Andy Malis
  Danny McPherson
  David Oran
  Jon Peterson
  Lynn St. Amour (ISOC Liaison)
  Dave Thaler
APOLOGIES
  Dow Street (IAB Executive Director)

2. Techchat on Large-scale Infrastructure and IETF Protocols

Vijay led the group in a discussion of the use of IETF protocols in environments with very large numbers of nodes, such as in the Google server infrastructure. The talk covered issues and scaling problems inherent with building compute systems at scale, including (i) the data network infrastructure that is necessary to support the application load, and (ii) the type of applications and their requirements, such as latency sensitive, throughput optimized, compute intensive, etc. The group also discussed the building of systems that can react to environmental input, such as temperature excursions, and how they drive data migration and usage. In some cases either local modification or novel application of protocols is necessary to achieve the necessary performance.