Dynamic right-sizing in FTP (drsFTP): Enhancing Grid performance in user-space

With the advent of computational grids, networking performance over the wide-area network (WAN) has become a critical component in the grid infrastructure. Unfortunately, many high-performance grid applications only use a small fraction of the available bandwidth because operating systems and their associated protocol stacks are still tuned for yesterdays WAN speeds. As a result, network gurus undertake the tedious process of manually, tuning system buffers to allow TCP flow control to scale to today´s WAN grid environments. Although recent research has shown how to set the size of these system buffers automatically at connection set-up, the buffer sizes are only appropriate at the beginning of the connection´s lifetime. To address these problems, we describe an automated and scalable technique called dynamic right-sizing. We implement this technique in user space (in particular for bulk-data transfer) so that end users do not have to modify the kernel to achieve a significant increase in throughput.