Evaluating High Performance Data Transfer with RDMA-based Protocols in Wide-Area Networks

The use of zero-copy RDMA is a promising area of development in support of high-performance data movement over wide-area networks. In particular, the emerging RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) standard enables the InfiniBand transport for use over existing and widely deployed network infrastructure. In this paper, we evaluate the use of RDMA over Ethernet in two deployment scenarios: 1) a gateway approach that adapts standard application connections to an RDMA-based protocol for transmission over wide-area network paths, and 2) the integration of our RDMA implementation into GridFTP, a popular data transfer tool for distributed computing. We evaluate both approaches over a number of wide-area network conditions emulated using a commercial network emulation device, and we analyze the overhead of our RDMA implementations from a systems perspective. Our results show a significant increase in network utilization and performance when using RDMA over high-latency paths with a reduced CPU and memory I/O footprint on our gateways and end host applications.