XIOPerf: A Tool For Evaluating Network Protocols

Abstract—The nature of Grid and distributed computing implies network communication between heterogeneous systems over a wide and ever-changing variety of network environments. Often times large amounts of data is stored in remote locations and must be transmitted in bulk. It is desirable to have the bulk data transfers be as fast as possible, however due to the dynamic networks involved it is often hard to predict what protocol will provide the fastest service for a given situation. In this paper we present XIOPerf, a network protocol testing and evaluation tool. XIOPerf is a command line program written on top of GlobusXIO with a simple and well defined interface to many different protocol implementations. XIOPerf was created to give users a way to quickly and easily experiment with an open ended set of protocols over real networks to determine which will best suit their needs. We present a brief study of the overhead introduced by XIOPerf and the performance of it when using a variety of protocols. I