UDT: Breaking the Data Transfer Bottleneck

UDT is a reliable UDP based application level data transport protocol for distributed data intensive applications over wide area high-speed networks. UDT uses UDP to transfer bulk data with its own reliability control and congestion control mechanisms. The new protocol can transfer data at a much higher speed than TCP does. UDT is also a highly configurable framework that can accommodate various congestion control algorithms. (Presentation: PPT 311KB / Poster: PDF 435KB )

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. In addition, multiple UDT flows can share a single UDP port, thus a firewall can open only one UDP port for all UDT connections. UDT also supports rendezvous connection setup.

May 22, 2009: UDT and Cloud Computing UDT was featured in a press release by National Science Foundation (NSF) titled "Data Travels Six Times Faster in the Clouds": The National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) established a cloud computing system (Sector) that can quickly compile data from widely geographically distributed data centers across high performance networks. Sector employs an alternative network protocol called UDT designed to swiftly and smoothly transfer data. Full story...

January 22, 2009: UDT Version 4.4 Release We have released version 4.4, which includes several critical bug fixes since the last version. Please note that we introduced two new APIs, startup and cleanup, in this version. Our next version will address the efficiency issue for very large number of concurrent connections. Thanks to everyone for helping us improve the software.

November 24, 2008: The UDT team have won the bandwidth challenge (again!) during the Supercomputing conference During the supercomputing 2008 (SC08) conference, we demonstrated three cloud applications (Cistrack - a bioinformaics portal, CreditStone - processing credit card transaction records, and Terasort). These applications are supported by our cloud software stack Sector/Sphere and run on the Open Cloud Testbed. Complicated movement of terabytes of data is required in these applications, and UDT has supported this very well. More...

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