Balanced Multicasting: High-throughput Communication for Grid Applications

Many grid applications need to transfer large amounts of data between the geographically distributed sites of a grid environment. Network heterogeneity between these sites makes throughput optimization of data transfers to multiple sites (multicast) hard or even impossible. We present a technique called balanced multicasting that uses monitoring information for both bandwidth capacity and achievable bandwidth to compute balanced multicast trees at runtime that use application-level traffic shaping at the sender side to avoid self-induced congestion. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach outperforms existing multicast strategies by large margins.