Publications

P. M. Dickens and W. Gropp, "An Evaluation of a User-Level Data Transfer Mechanism for High-Performance Networks," Preprint ANL/MCS-P976-0602, June 2002. [pdf]

In this paper, we describe FOBS: a simple user-level communication protocol designed to take advantage of the available bandwidth in a high-bandwidth, high-delay network environment. We compare the performance of FOBS with that of TCP both with and without the so-called Large Window extensions designed to improve the performance of TCP in this type of network environment. We show that FOBS can obtain on the order of 90% of the available bandwidth across both short- and long-haul high-performance network connections. For the long-haul connection, the bandwidth obtained was 1.8 times higher than that of the optimized TCP algorithm. Also, we demonstrate that the additional traffic placed on the network because of the greedy nature of the algorithm is quite reasonable, representing approximately 3% of the total data transferred.