Wide-area performance profiling of 10GigE and InfiniBand technologies

For wide-area high-performance applications, light-paths provide 10Gbps connectivity, and multi-core hosts with PCI-Express can drive such data rates. However, sustaining such end-to-end application throughputs across connections of thousands of miles remains challenging, and the current performance studies of such solutions are very limited. We present an experimental study of two solutions to achieve such throughputs based on: (a) 10Gbps Ethernet with TCP/IP transport protocols, and (b) InfiniBand and its wide-area extensions. For both, we generate performance profiles over 10Gbps connections of lengths up to 8600 miles, and discuss the components, complexity, and limitations of sustaining such throughputs, using different connections and host configurations. Our results indicate that IB solution is better suited for applications with a single large flow, and 10GigE solution is better for those with multiple competing flows.