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 450KB / Poster: PDF 435KB )

award Supercomputing 2009 Bandwidth Challenge Winner
award Supercomputing 2008 Bandwidth Challenge Winner
award Supercomputing 2006 Bandwidth Challenge Winner

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. UDT is the core technology in many commercial WAN acceleration products.

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.

UDT is a protocol and library; it does not provide a tool/application for end users directly. If you need a system software to support wide area data storage and distribution, please try Sector.

Dec. 29, 2011: UDT v4.10 release!It has been a relatively quiet year on UDT but we have managed to introduce some non-trivial features in version 4.9 and 4.10. We have greatly imroved the epoll API and also added support to non-blocking connect API. In 2012, we will try harder to introduce UDT to more use scenarios.

Dec. 29, 2010: UDT v4.8 release! UDT version 4.8 introduces new epoll API, which significantly improves the scalabity on concurrent connections. Our experiments show that now UDT can easily support 100K+ connections via a single UDP port on a commodity server (buffer size needs to be reduced accordingly). Thanks every UDT user for your continuing support.

June 14 , 2010: A High Performance Data Distribution and Sharing Solution with Sector We invite you to try Sector as your data distribution and sharing platform. Unlike FTP and most commercial applications, Sector can provide a uniform namespace over multiple servers, even 1000s. Meanwhile, users can mount the client side as a local file system directory so that it is completely transparent. All data transfer between servers and clients is on top of UDT. You can follow this blog to set up the system.

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