3rd International IEEE/Create-Net Workshop on Networks for Grid Applications

Research Article

XIOPerf: A Tool for Evaluating Network Protocols

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374318,
        author={John Bresnahan and Rajkumar Kettimuthu and Ian Foster},
        title={XIOPerf: A Tool for Evaluating Network Protocols},
        proceedings={3rd International IEEE/Create-Net Workshop on Networks for Grid Applications},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={GRIDNETS},
        year={2006},
        month={10},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374318}
    }
    
  • John Bresnahan
    Rajkumar Kettimuthu
    Ian Foster
    Year: 2006
    XIOPerf: A Tool for Evaluating Network Protocols
    GRIDNETS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374318
John Bresnahan1,*, Rajkumar Kettimuthu1,*, Ian Foster1,*
  • 1: Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439
*Contact email: bresnaha@mcs.anl.gov, kettimut@mcs.anl.gov, foster@mcs.anl.gov

Abstract

The nature of grid and distributed computing implies communication between heterogeneous systems over a wide and ever-changing variety of network environments. Often large amounts of data are stored in remote locations and must be transmitted in bulk. It is desirable to have the bulk data transfers be as fast as possible; however, because of the dynamic networks involved, it is often hard to predict what protocol will provide the fastest service for a given situation. In this paper we present XlOPerf, a network protocol testing and evaluation tool. XlOPerf is a command line program written on top of Globus XIO with a simple and well-defined interface to many different protocol implementations. XlOPerf was created to give users a way to quickly and easily experiment with an open-ended set of protocols over real networks to determine which will best suit their needs. We present a brief study of the overhead introduced by XlOPerf and the performance when using a variety of protocols.