SCTP, XTP and TCP as Transport Protocols for High Performance Computing on Multi-cluster Grid Environments

Multi-cores and multi-processors loosely coupled architectures are interesting commodity off-the-shelf architectures with which to build multi-cluster configurations as grid environments. However, such grid environments face challenges that must be circumvented. Examples include the heterogeneity of computational resources (e.g. operating systems, processors), of different programming paradigms and of network protocols. Transport protocols are especially important, because they can directly impact the execution of distributed engineering and scientific applications. In this paper, we present an empirical study of the SCTP, XTP and TCP as transport protocols with which to support applications in multi-cluster configurations. The environment includes several networks of workstations (NOWs) interconnected via a wide area network. Our experiments consider throughput and latency parameters against number of flows; the results show performance differences from the three transport protocols over a real distributed production configurations.