SCTP-Based Middleware for MPI

SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is a recently standardized transport level protocol with several features that better support the communication requirements of parallel applications; these features are not present in traditional TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). These features make SCTP a good candidate as a transport level protocol for MPI (Message Passing Interface). MPI is a message passing middleware that is widely used to parallelize scientific and compute intensive applications. TCP is often used as the transport protocol for MPI in both local area and wide-area networks. Prior to this work, SCTP has not been used for MPI. In this thesis, we compared and evaluated the benefits of using SCTP instead of TCP as the underlying transport protocol for MPI. We redesigned LAM-MPI, a public domain version of MPI, to use SCTP. We describe the advantages and disadvantages of using SCTP, the necessary modifications to the MPI middleware to use SCTP, and the performance of SCTP as compared to the stock implementation that uses TCP.