RXIO: Design and implementation of high performance RDMA-capable GridFTP

Abstract

For its low-latency, high bandwidth, and low CPU utilization, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) has established itself as an effective data movement technology in many networking environments. However, the transport protocols of grid run-time systems, such as GridFTP in Globus, are not yet capable of utilizing RDMA. In this study, we examine the architecture of GridFTP for the feasibility of enabling RDMA. An RDMA-capable XIO (RXIO) framework is designed and implemented to extend its XIO system and match the characteristics of RDMA. Our experimental results demonstrate that RDMA can significantly improve the performance of GridFTP, reducing the latency by 32% and increasing the bandwidth by more than three times. In achieving such performance improvements, RDMA dramatically cuts down CPU utilization of GridFTP clients and servers. These results demonstrate that RXIO can effectively exploit the benefits of RDMA for GridFTP. It offers a good prototype to further leverage GridFTP on wide-area RDMA networks.