My name is Guillermo Lopez Taboada, and 10 years ago I was enjoying my PhD days at the Computer Architecture Group (GAC) at the University of A Corunna (Spain) implementing Java Fast Sockets (JFS), a high-performance library that, back in early 2005, showed 9 microseconds latency over a network connection. An order of magnitude faster than using standard Java network sockets. And twice faster than Java localhost communications. The initial ideas were sketched in the paper “Designing Efficient Java Communications on Clusters“, presented in Denver (CO) in Spring 2005.
Three years later the project grew up, more results were published in the paper “Java Fast Sockets: Enabling high-speed Java communications on high performance clusters” and finally, in 2009, the PhD degree was successfully achieved!. The results were highly interesting, by optimizing Java sockets any socket-based library/application (e.g., RMI and messaging libraries) would greatly benefit from it.
Soon after that people started to manifest their interest in JFS, even Ed Burnette from ZDnet reported about it in this post back in 2009, and it looked like there was potential for commercialization. Around a hundred contacts from companies, mainly from the financial sector, encouraged this idea.
In 2010 Fundacion Barrie sponsored and funded a Proof-of-Concept project looking for the commercial validation of the technology, a dream started by Fundacion Barrie and a team of 5, Ramon Doallo, Juan Tourino, Sabela Ramos, Roberto Rey and myself, and now a reality in the company Torusware, incorporated in 2013, spin-out of the PoC project of the university.
Today Torusware is a team of 15, the technology is no longer limited to Java and Linux, it accelerates any application on Linux and Solaris, and targets both bare metal and virtualized environments, either in premises or the cloud. From 9 microseconds to barely 100 nanoseconds, world record in low-latency performance.
So far we have come a long way, we built our team, got our first paying customers, and new projects in mind. We want to be the reference in BUS/LAN communication acceleration both in premises and the cloud, with our unique value proposition, accelerating any application on any infrastructure, without any software/hardware change.
Today we want to share our dreams with you, our product Speedus is available for free forever at https://www.torusware.com. Please, drop us a line at info@torusware.com if you are interested in full support of the PRO version or just if you want to share your Speedus experience with us.
Happy acceleration!