Designing Zero-Copy FTP Mechanisms to Achieve High Performance Data-Transfer over InfiniBand

Abstract—FTP has been the most popular method to transfer large files for data-staging, replication, and the like. While existing FTP mechanisms have improved gradually with newer networks, they still inherit the fundamental limitations imposed by the underlying networking protocols (TCP/UDP) they use. These include limited network bandwidth utilization, high mem-ory bandwidth and CPU utilization that TCP/UDP cause on the end-nodes. Thus both the performance and scalability of such systems is limited. The advent of InfiniBand (IB) WAN has enabled the use of high performance transport protocols in the WAN scenarios, which can be leveraged for designing FTP mechanisms. Enabling IB-based FTP capabilities and providing good efficiency for such transfers presents considerable challenge. In this paper we present an Advanced Data Transfer Service (ADTS) to enable efficient data transfers over WAN. We leverag