An experiment with Globus over a satellite link

This paper aims at understanding the behavior of a grid where a multicast network is used for communications. In particular, our attention is focused on a network where the multicast transmission comes mainly from a GEO satellite link. We show the details of a new use of a reliable multicast protocol, SRDP, in the Globus toolkit. Theoretical analysis and results from a real test show that, for a subset of grid applications, the multicast transmission is much more efficient than the unicast one.