PSockets: The Case for Application-level Network Striping for Data Intensive Applications using High Speed Wide Area Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used by various applications to achieve reliable data transfer. TCP was originally designed for unreliable networks. With the emergence of high-speed wide area networks various improvements have been applied to TCP to reduce latency and achieve improved bandwidth. The improvement is achieved by having system administrators tune the network and can take a considerable amount of time. This paper introduces PSockets (Parallel Sockets), a library that achieves an equivalent performance without manual tuning. The basic idea behind PSockets is to exploit network striping. By network striping we mean striping partitioned data across several open sockets. We describe experimental studies using PSockets over the Abilene network. We show in particular that network striping using PSockets is effective for high performance data intensive computing applications using geographically distributed data.