Ultra High Speed Transport Protocol and Architecture

Emerging distributed science applications are expected to generate petabytes of data that must be transferred to geographically distributed tera-scale computing facilities. Ultra-high bandwidth will be needed to achieve this transfer. While the bandwidth is available in network link technology, transport architectural inefficiencies severely limit the throughput attainable over such links. This project will develop an innovative network transport mechanism, Transport Control Protocol-Fiber (TCPF) technology, that allows networking at full link speed over an ultra high-speed network. The approach deals with network data transport inefficiencies by providing intelligent, fast, and accurate network measurement, and employs a hardware-assisted approach for congestion control adjustment. Phase I demonstrated the feasibility and potential of the TCPF technology by using a real-world 10 Gigabit network testbed. For file transfers, network utilization improved by a factor of nine. Phase II will focus on optimization of the TCPF design, development/experimentation of the ultra high speed advanced network measurements, development of full-scale TCPF software, development of the TCPF Network Interface Card hardware, integration/testing/evaluation of the system prototype, and evaluation of commercial scenarios. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The Transport Control Protocol-Fiber should enable large-scale distributed scientific applications such as environmental monitoring, energy physics, nuclear energy, computational genomics, climate modeling. It also should have significant commercial value in inter-networking applications such as private enterprise networks, distributed multimedia networks, and entertainment network applications. Due to its network independence, it also should be applicable as a transport directly over different link layers and heterogeneous networks, such as Internet II