Scalable and Reliable Data Broadcast with Kascade

Many large scale scientific computations or Big Data analysis require the distribution of large amounts of data to each machine involved. That distribution of data often has a key role in the overall performance of the operation. In this paper, we present Kascade, a solution for the broadcast of data to a large set of compute nodes. We evaluate Kascade using a set of large scale experiments in a variety of experimental settings, and show that Kascade: (1) achieves very high scalability by organizing nodes in a pipeline; (2) can almost saturate a 1 Gbit/s network, even at large scale; (3) handles failures of nodes during the transfer gracefully thanks to a fault-tolerant design.