High-performance message striping over reliable transport protocols

This paper introduces a high-performance middleware-level message striping approach to increase communication bandwidth for data transfer in heterogeneous clusters equipped with multiple networks. In this scheme, concurrency is used for the striping process. The proposed striping approach is designed to work at the middleware-level, between the distributed applications and the reliable transport protocols such as TCP. The middleware-level striping approach provides flexible, scalable, and hardware-, network-, and operating systems-independent communication bandwidth solution. In addition, techniques to enhance the performance of this approach over multiple networks are introduced. The proposed techniques, which minimize synchronization contention and eliminate the striping sequence header, rely on the features of a reliable transport protocol such as TCP to reduce some of the concurrent striping overhead. The techniques have been implemented and evaluated on a real cluster with multiple networks and the results show significant performance gains for data transfer over existing approaches.