XIOPerf: A Tool for Evaluating Network Protocols

The nature of grid and distributed computing implies communication between heterogeneous systems over a wide and ever-changing variety of network environments. Often large amounts of data are 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, because of 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 XlOPerf, a network protocol testing and evaluation tool. XlOPerf is a command line program written on top of Globus XIO with a simple and well-defined interface to many different protocol implementations. XlOPerf 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 XlOPerf and the performance when using a variety of protocols.