Experimental study of wide-area 10 Gbps IP transport technologies

Abstract

A number of large-scale applications require 10 Gbps data transport rates between high-performance computing, storage and file systems, which are connected over wide-area networks. Achieving such capability requires end-to-end optimization of all required hardware and software components including: (i) long haul SONET or 10 GigE connections; (ii) transport protocols such as TCP and UDT, (iii) encryption devices deployed at connection end points, and (iv) host computing, storage and file systems. We present a systematic experimental study of these technologies over 10 Gbps wide-area connections. We first describe a national-scale network testbed with high-performance edge and host systems, which supports dynamic provisioning of 10 Gbps connections of varying lengths. We generate the performance profiles for TCP and UDP with and without encryption devices, and qualitatively describe the effects of latter on transport methods. For file transfers using TCP and UDT, the encryption devices have the equivalent effect of reduced latency and smoother dynamics, respectively, due to on-board buffers. Our experimental results show that these encryption devices lead to higher or smoother file transfer throughputs in spite of the added latency due to packet encryption and decryption.