The Spread Toolkit Accelerated Ring Experimental release 4.3.0 has been
released. This version features an experimental protocol and was
developed as part of research being done at the Distributed Systems and
Networks Lab at Johns Hopkins University. You read about and download it here: <a href="http://www.spread.org/AcceleratedRingExperimentalRelease.html" target="_blank">http://www.spread.org/AcceleratedRingExperimentalRelease.html</a>.<br>
<br>The new protocol is tailored for data center networks, and my
experiments show that it can provide a 30-50% increase in throughput and
a 20-35% reduction in latency compared to the original protocol in
local area networks. We
would encourage you to test it out and would love to hear about your
experiences and any issues you encounter.<br>
<br>For those interested in performance-tuning for the Accelerated Ring
protocol, the relevant configuration parameters are AcceleratedRing and
AcceleratedWindow. AcceleratedRing must be set to "true" in the
spread.conf file to enable the Accelerated Ring protocol.
AcceleratedWindow specifies the number of packets from the
PersonalWindow that will be sent after the token. In general, the higher
(closer to the full PersonalWindow) the AcceleratedWindow is, the
faster the token circulates, and the greater the throughput and latency
benefits are. However, for large values of PersonalWindow (e.g. 100), setting
AcceleratedWindow too high can lead to reduced throughput due to retransmissions.<br>
<br>The sample.spread.conf file included in the release includes
settings of AcceleratedRing=true, AcceleratedWindow=20,
PersonalWindow=20, and GlobalWindow=100, which we found to provide a good
performance tradeoff in our experiments for 1-Gig and 10-Gig networks.<br><br>Amy Babay<br><a href="http://cnds.jhu.edu/~babay/" target="_blank">http://cnds.jhu.edu/~babay/</a><br>