A scalable high-performance communication library for wide-area environments

We report our progress on SSOCK, a scalable high-performance communication library for wide-area environments. SSOCK has an API similar to that of the Socket library, but solves the connectivity and scalability issues involved with WANs. In one experiment, SSOCK was able to connect 1,262 processes with each other in a 13-cluster environment with firewalls and NAT, without any of the connectivity and resource allocation problems that were encountered when the Socket library was used. In another experiment in which 100 processes simultaneously tried to establish connections, SSOCK was able to establish connections between all pairs of processes in 1.2 seconds, while the Socket library suffered from a large number of packet losses and timed out after 189 seconds.