SCTP-based middleware for MPI in wide-area networks

SCTP (stream control transmission protocol) is a recently standardized transport level protocol that has several features not present in TCP. These features make SCTP a better transport level protocol to support MPI (message passing interface). MPI is a message passing library that is widely used to parallelize scientific and compute intensive programs. Recently there has been interest in porting MPI programs to execute in a wide area network. We evaluated the use of SCTP and designed and modified a public domain version of the MPI middleware to use SCTP. We describe the advantages and disadvantages of SCTP and describe the changes that were necessary to the MPI middleware.