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Spike In Telecommuting A Stress Test For The Internet–Expert

The coronavirus pandemic forcing workers and students to stay at home is a “stress test” for the internet — and there’ll be “cascading failures” fixed “on the fly,” according to a Harvard computer science expert and teacher.

In an interview posted on Techxplore, tech industry veteran and Harvard computer science professor Jim Waldo said the “stay-at-home” mandate by schools and businesses will be a test of the durability of the internet.

“We built the internet years years ago to handle the kind of traffic that researchers needed, and it has grown to be part of the fabric of everyday life,” Waldo said. “Now we are going to stress-test it in a way it has never been before. And the internet was always built to be sort of reliably crummy.”

According to Waldo, if something fails the stress test, there’ll be good news and bad news.

There will be cascading failures that will get fixed on the fly,” he said. “I spent more than 30 years in industry, and one of the major ways you learn in industry is when things fail. In all of engineering, it’s that way. So failure is an opportunity to make things better. We just have to be sure we know why we failed and make sure we don’t fail the same way twice.”

“It’s a weird feeling—both of elation and being scared to death—that this is giving to a lot of us because it is such an opportunity to learn and experiment,” he said.

“I actually look at this as a very interesting experiment,” he said.

Source: Newsmax

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