UDT: Breaking the Data Transfer Bottleneck

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UDT: Breaking the Data Transfer Bottleneck

UDT is an application level data transport protocol for emerging distributed data intensive applications over wide area high-speed networks. UDT uses UDP to transfer bulk data and it has its own reliability control and congestion control mechanisms. This new protocol is not only for private or QoS-enabled links, but also for shared networks. Furthermore, UDT is also a highly configurable framework that can accommodate various congestion control algorithms. (Presentation: PPT 311KB)

Key Features

Fast. UDT is designed for extremely high speed networks and it has been used to support global data transfer of terabyte sized data sets.

Fair and Friendly. Concurrent UDT flows can share the available bandwidth fairly, while UDT also leaves enough bandwidth for TCP.

Easy to Use. UDT resides completely at the application level. Users can simply download the software and start to use it. No kernel reconfiguration is needed. In addition, UDT's API is very similar to the traditional socket API so that existing applications can be easily modified.

Highly Configurable. UDT supports user defined congestion control algorithms with a simple configuration. Users may also modify UDT to suit various situations. This feature can also be used by students and researchers to investigate new control algorithms.

Firewall Friendly. UDT is completely based on UDP, which makes it easier to traverse the firewall. Starting from UDTv4, multiple UDT flows can share one UDP port, thus a firewall can open only one UDP port for all UDT connections. UDT also supports rendezvous connection setup.

July 20, 2008: Powered by UDT?We are setting up a web page to list projects that uses UDT for data and message transfer. Please drop me an email (gu#lac.uic.edu) about how you use UDT in your project if you are interested. (Note: Whether you send me the information or not does NOT affect your right in using UDT.) This will help us promote the UDT protocol and further improve it based on users' feedbacks. Thanks for your input.

July 20, 2008: UDT supports communication in large scale cloud computing system UDT is used in cloud computing software Sector/Sphere for both message passing and data transfer. UDT provides better scalability, performance, and security than Linux TCP in this system. We have installed Sector/Sphere in a 120-node system deployed across the United States. In this system, more than 120*120 concurrent UDT connections are used for data exchanging during a data intensive distributed application.

October 26, 2007: UDT version 4.0 Release UDTv4 is the latest version of the new versatile high speed UDP-based data transfer protocol. One of the major improvement from UDTv3 is that UDTv4 can bind multiple UDT sockets on the same UDP port. UDTv4 also greatly improved the configurable congestion control (CCC) module as its native control algorithm is also written based on CCC. Finally, in order to reach a wider audience, we have released UDTv4 under BSD license.