Homa cuts datacenter short-message latency thirteenfold versus TCP

On October 1, 2026, John Ousterhout, Stanford professor emeritus, made the case for Homa, a message-based transport protocol whose p99 latency on short messages drops to 92 microseconds against 1.2 milliseconds for TCP over a 100 Gbps link. Evaluate it on the datacenter links where every millisecond idles a GPU, but price the adoption cost before replacing anything.