Homa Transport Protocol for AI Clusters

Homa is a new transport protocol designed to address the latency challenges of modern AI workloads, particularly inference and agentic applications, in data center environments. It moves away from TCP's sender-driven congestion control and byte-stream model to a receiver-driven, message-based approach that leverages switch hardware queues for prioritizing short, critical messages. This significantly reduces tail latency for coordination traffic while maintaining high throughput for large data transfers.