XTP as a Transport Protocol for Distributed Parallel Processing

The Xpress Transfer Protocol (XTP) is a flexible transport layer protocol designed to provide efficient service without dictating the communication paradigm or the delivery characteristics that qualify the paradigm. XTP provides the tools to build communication services appropriate to the application. Current data delivery solutions for many popular cluster computing environments use TCP and UDP. We examine TCP, UDP, and XTP with respect to the communication characteristics typical of parallel applications. We perform measurements of end-to-end latency for several paradigms important to cluster computing. An implementation of XTP is shown to be comparable to TCP in end-to-end latency on preestablished connections, and does better for paradigms where connections must be constructed on the fly.