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Scientists abuzz over more efficient Web servers
Real-world applications
A chance to apply that lesson to other applications arrived a few years ago when Oxford University computer science graduate student Sunil Nakrani walked through Tovey’s office door with a vexing problem related to Internet servers.
Within Web-hosting businesses, the Internet servers needed to power Web sites are often divvied up according to specific clients or sites. Although the servers are optimized for normal conditions, Internet surfers are notoriously fickle. Sudden and unpredictable spikes in demand can overwhelm a site’s allotted servers as they reach capacity while others are sitting idly by, creating the possibility of lock-outs or long queues for frustrated customers — and a missed opportunity once they leave in exasperation.
“He just started to explain his problem and I immediately saw a superficial resemblance between what he was describing and honeybee communication,” Tovey said. But superficial resemblances, he said, often break down when you delve into the details. “The amazing thing was that when he was still describing the problem after 15 minutes, I was still holding the bee analogy in my head.”
Tovey realized that on a fundamental level, both the servers and the bees faced similar barriers to efficiency in an unpredictable, ever-changing environment. “So I said, ‘Sunil, let’s try imitating what the bees do.’ ”
No, the network of Internet servers did not gyrate in an electronic version of a line dance. As a stand-in for the dance floor, Tovey and his colleagues used what they called an advertisement board, which sent messages to communicate the location of hot Web sites. When one server received a user request to help out at a specific site, an internal ad popped up on the board to attract other servers in the hosting center. As in the hive, ads for locations in demand and offering better income potential lasted longer. And the longer the ads aired, the more they increased the chance that other servers would be recruited to help power the site du jour. Tovey said revenue, page hits or other parameters measuring a site’s popularity could all do nicely as online nectar substitutes.
Bee-inspired ad system
For an Internet hosting company whose income depends upon completed transactions, Tovey and his colleagues used the bee-inspired advertisement system to increase revenues by 4 percent to 20 percent, according to their study in the December issue of the online journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
Jennifer Fewell, co-director of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity at Arizona State University in Tempe, said the waggle dance “works beautifully” as a distributed system involving rather uncomplicated individuals. As long as the bees know where to get their information — the hive’s dance floor — they don’t need much in the way of advance instructions.
When told about Tovey’s new research, Fewell said the dance struck her as a great model for solving the Internet server problem. “If you can do something with a simple rule set, that’s usually the best way to do it,” she said.
Tovey said the honeybee communication system would be suboptimal in a world that lacked variability. The return for the bees’ sacrifice of perfect efficiency is an uncanny ability to rapidly shift foraging strategies to home in on the sweet spots of the moment. Similarly with the Internet, “it wouldn’t be such a difficult problem if you knew in advance what the traffic was going to be like,” he said.
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The researchers found that their honeybee analogy could be extended even further to help Internet centers save on electricity costs. On a cloudy day, for example, only a fraction of the hive’s workers forage for nectar while the rest stay in reserve. The homebodies aren’t expending much energy during their downtime, almost like a computer in sleep mode.
“We imitated that aspect of what honeybees do, and we’re trying that out on the Web center’s hosting problem,” Tovey said. So far, the method has reduced energy prices by 15 percent to 20 percent, with only a slight dip in revenue. Oxford and Georgia Tech have taken out a provisional patent on the energy-saving application, though Tovey said his team is still refining the methodology.
The bees, it seems, are showing once again that it really pays to mimic Mother Nature.
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