XTP as a Transport Protocol for Distributed Parallel Processing
W.Timothy Strayer, Michael J. Lewis, & Raymond E. Cline, Jr.
Distributed Computing Department
Sandia National Laboratories, California
{strayer,mlewis,rec}@ca.sandia.gov
Abstract
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.
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