Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks

prostoalex writes "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality. 'On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance.' Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page."

Reasearch vs reality

[afidel]

The problem of internet optimization stopped being a research subject years ago and is more of a business problem. Peering relationships and lowest cost routing mean that traffic will often travel a suboptimal route from a networking perspective because it is the best route from a providers financial perspective.

Power saving data center

[XPisthenewNT]

The end of the article comments on how the bee algorithm also allows the data center to save power. It seems like if the data center isn't getting many requests, it can send some servers into power saving standby mode. Much like if there isn't much honey to collect, the bees stay in the hive and save energy.

Are other web data centers able to shut down some servers at night to save power, or is it just because this data center seems configured to allow the servers to each serve any number of websites?