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This paper presents the motivation and design of MTP, a new offload-friendly message transport protocol. Existing transport protocols like TCP, MPTCP, and UDP/Quic all have key limitations when used in a network that may potentially offload computation from end-servers into NICs, switches, and other network devices. To enable important new in-network computing use cases and correct congestion control in the face of ever changing network paths and application replicas, MTP introduces a new message transport protocol design and pathlet congestion control, a new approach where end-hosts explicitly communicate messaging information to network devices and network devices explicitly communicate network path and congestion information back to end-hosts.
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This content will become publicly available on November 18, 2025
Shape-shifting Elephants: Multi-modal Transport for Integrated Research Infrastructure
Data Acquisition (DAQ) workloads form an important class of scientific network traffic that by its nature (1) flows across different research infrastructure, including remote instruments and supercomputer clusters, (2) has ever-increasing through-put demands, and (3) has ever-increasing integration demands—for example, observations at one instrument could trigger a reconfiguration of another instrument. Today’s DAQ transfers rely on UDP and (heavily tuned) TCP, but this is driven by convenience rather than suitability. The mismatch between Internet transport protocols and scientific workloads becomes more stark with the steady increase in link capacities, data generation, and integration across research infrastructure. This position paper argues the importance of developing specialized transport protocols for DAQ workloads. It proposes a new transport feature for this kind of elephant flow: multi-modality involves the network actively configuring the transport protocol to change how DAQ flows are processed across different underlying networks that connect scientific research infrastructure. Multi-modality is a layering violation that is proposed as a pragmatic technique for DAQ transport protocol design. It takes advantage of programmable network hardware that is increasingly being deployed in scientific research infrastructure. The paper presents an initial evaluation through a pilot study that includes a Tofino2 switch and Alveo FPGA cards, and using data from a particle detector.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2346499
- PAR ID:
- 10601200
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400712722
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 308 to 317
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Irvine CA USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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