Paper Details

%T Improving TCP/IP Multicasting with Message Segmentation
%A Hans Henrik Happe, Brian Vinter
%E Jan F. Broenink, Herman Roebbers, Johan P. E. Sunter, Peter H. Welch, David C. Wood
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2005
%X Multicasting is a very important operation in high
   performance parallel applications. Making this operation
   efficient in supercomputers has been a topic of great
   concern. Much effort has gone into designing special
   interconnects to support the operation.
   Today&\[sh]8217;s huge deployment of NoWs (Network of
   Workstations) has created a high demand for efficient
   software\-based multicast solutions. These systems are often
   based on low\-cost Ethernet interconnects without direct
   support for group communication. Basically TCP/IP is the
   only widely supported method of fast reliable communication,
   though it is possible to improve Ethernet performance at
   many levels &\[sh]8211; i.e., by\-passing the operating
   system or using physical broadcasting. Low\-level
   improvements are not likely to be accepted in production
   environments, which leaves TCP/IP as the best overall choice
   for group communication. In this paper we describe a TCP/IP
   based multicasting algorithm that uses message segmentation
   in order to lower the propagation delay. Experiments have
   shown that TCP is very inefficient when a node has many
   active connections. With this in mind we have designed the
   algorithm so that it has a worst\-case propagation path
   length of O(log n) with a minimum of connections per node.
   We compare our algorithm with the binomial tree algorithm
   often used in TCP/IP MPI implementations.

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