Web100: Facilitating Effective and Transparent Network Use

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal is aimed at creating TCP autotuning so the TCP applications take full advantage of the available bandwidth without the need for off-line manual tuning by the experts. Part of the work is to the design of TCP Management Information Base (MIB) first for identifying where the performance bottleneck is (receiver, transmitter or the network path itself) and then use that information for performing automatic and dynamic TCP tuning at the level of the user process (autotuning). The primary application focus of this effort is on the scientific bulk data transfer using FTP. Implementation of an optimized FTP code is part of this work. In parallel with the development effort the project will also pursue substantial user support services and vendor liaison. The development will be based on the commodity Intel hardware and Linux OS, however, the goal is for other OS vendors to adopt and incorporate TCP autotuning in their kernels.