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September 5, 2019 01:00 pm

Sally Floyd, Who Helped Things Run Smoothly Online, Dies At 69

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report from The New York Times commemorating Sally Floyd, a computer scientist who recently passed away at the age of 69 from metastatic gall bladder cancer. "Dr. Floyd was best known as one of the inventors of Random Early Detection, or RED, an algorithm widely used in the internet," reports The New York Times. "Though not readily visible to internet users, it helps traffic on the network flow smoothly during periods of overload." From the report: The internet consists of a series of linked routers. When computers communicate with one another through the internet, they divide the information they intend to exchange into packets of data, which are sent to the network in a sequence. A router examines each packet it receives, then sends it on to its intended destination. But when routers receive more packets than they can handle immediately, they queue those packets in a holding area called a buffer, which can increase the delay in transmitting data. Moreover, the buffer has a limited capacity, so if the router continually receives traffic at a higher rate than it can forward, at some point it will discard incoming traffic. For all their ingenuity, the creators of the internet did not foresee some of the difficulties that arose as the network grew. Well into the 1980s, the internet frequently experienced a period of huge degradation in performance known as a congestion collapse. Here the network's capacity was consumed by computers repeatedly transmitting packets, which routers were forced to discard because of overload. Dr. Floyd's Random Early Detection was an enhancement of work done in the 1980s byVan Jacobson, a computer scientist whose scheme for signaling computers to slow down is often credited with saving the internet from collapse in the '80s and '90s. Dr. Floyd and Dr. Jacobson developed RED together. "With RED, a router would generate a signal saying, 'I've got enough backlog that I'm going to tell senders I'm backed up,'" said Vern Paxson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who collaborated on research with Dr. Floyd. This meant that by discarding the occasional data packet earlier, routers could often avoid getting completely clogged.

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