End-to-end data transfer rate requirements in the computational science communities ---including computational biology, physics, astronomy, medicine, and environmental modeling--- are soon to approach the terabit-per-second regime. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art in end-to-end transport protocol implementations scales to at most a few gigabit-per-seconds of single-stream steady-state throughput. This project will develop a 10Gbps+ Linux transport-layer stack of the novel paradigm of "packet-scale congestion-control", which can potentially improve scalability by several orders of magnitude. For this, the project will: (i) develop a non ACK-clocked state machine that replaces the TCP state machine, and (ii) develop both software-based as well as hardware-assisted high-speed implementations of precise inter-packet gap control and packet timestamping. The implementation will be extensively tested on a 10Gbps in-laboratory test-bed as well as on nationwide NLR paths. The project will then partner with up to three projects from the scientific domain, for deploying and evaluating the impact of the protocol stack on their infrastructure. The resultant implementation is expected to be transformative in the design and implementation of non ACK-clocked transport protocols. It is expected to dramatically improve large high-speed bulk data transfers, without requiring expensive dedicated networks, thus revolutionizing how the computational science community relies on the networking infrastructure.
