Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used by various applications to achieve reliable data transfer. TCP was originally designed for unreliable networks. With the emergence of high-speed wide area networks various improvements have been applied to TCP to reduce latency and achieve improved bandwidth. The improvement is achieved by having system administrators tune the network and can take a considerable amount of time. This paper introduces PSockets (Parallel Sockets), a library that achieves an equivalent performance without manual tuning. The basic idea behind PSockets is to exploit network striping. By network striping we mean striping partitioned data across several open sockets. We describe experimental studies using PSockets over the Abilene network. We show in particular that network striping using PSockets is effective for high performance data intensive computing applications using geographically distributed data.

The growth of high-speed wide area networks (WANs) has enabled the emergence of new classes of data intensive, wide area computing applications, such as the remote analysis and exploration of data and distributed data mining. The de facto standard for reliable data transfers is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Despite improvements in TCP over the years (to reduce overhead and achieve higher throughput), it is still a common experience for the end-to-end data rates of wide area data mining and data analysis applications to be inefficient. This paper introduces a library called SABUL (Simple Available Bandwidth Utilization Library) which merges features of UDP and TCP to produce a light-weight protocol with flow control, rate control and reliable transmission mechanisms that is designed for data intensive applications over wide area high performance networks. In this paper, we describe the library and give experimental evidence of its effectiveness.

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