Exploiting Network Parallelism for Improving Data Transfer Performance

Many scientific applications, including bulk data transfer, can achieve significantly higher performance from virtually loss-free dedicated resources provisioned on shared links, than from opportunistic network use. Research and Education (R&E) backbones, including the Energy Sciences Network and Internet2, provide general-purpose services to allocate dedicated bandwidth. However, in order to fully take advantage of this technology, applications need to move from coarse-grained "reservation" strategies, to more sophisticated control based on software defined networking (SDN) with technologies such as OpenFlow. We propose here, as one practical step in this direction, using multiple paths for the same application transfer session. This can add bandwidth from "best effort" and dedicated networks, and can also facilitate performance with applications using multiple 10G NICs over 100G capable paths.