SCTP-based middleware for MPI in wide-area networks

SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a recently standardized transport level protocol that has several features not present in TCP. These features make SCTP a better transport level protocol to support MPI (Message Passing Interface). MPI is a message passing library that is widely used to parallelize scientific and compute intensive programs. Recently there has been interest in porting MPI programs to execute in a Wide Area Network. We evaluated the use of SCTP and designed and modified a public domain version of the MPI middleware to use SCTP We describe the advantages and disadvantages of SCTP and describe the changes that were necessary to the MPI middleware.