Over the last decade we have been witnessing a tremendous increase in the capacities of our  computation and communication systems. On the one hand, processor speeds have been increasing  exponentially, doubling every 18 months or so, while network bandwidth, has followed a similar (if  not higher) rate of improvement, doubling every 9-12 months, or so. Unfortunately, applications that  communicate frequently using standard protocols like TCP/IP do not seem to improve at similar  rates