RE: CIDR Report

["Roeland Meyer (E-mail)" <rmeyer () mhsc com>]

> Wolfgang Henke: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 10:16 AM

> This suggests a generally flatter architecture, maybe parallel.  Still
> remember the supercomputer discussions a few years back when experts
> argued if either KSR or Thinking Machines is going to be
> *the* big win?
>
> And today when you need a lot of processing e.g. for rendering, you
> simply stick a couple dozen Pentiums on a fast switched ethernet.

What you are suggesting here is some form of distributed routing
process. The current problem is that all the router protocols store all
their data in talbes and they ALL have near identicle copies of these
tables. BGP is simply a synchronization mechanism. In fact, all the
routing protocols can be viewed as simple synchronization mechanisms.
Re-architecting that structure is not going to be simple and could
probably be the basis of an IETF working group. If the IAB could ever
get off their political duff (and back to real work), maybe they could
lead such an effort.

These days, the IAB is too busy making political pronouncements that
have nothing to do with internet architecture. Inertia is great/huge and
that job is probably not do-able. Us mercenary commercial architects are
not going to do it for free either.