Reliable Multicast Protocols for Java-based Grid Middleware Platforms

Grids are becoming effective infrastructures for high-performance, network-unaware, general purpose, distributed applications. Most of Grid applications demand for large sets of data to be reliably delivered to a wide collection of resources. Even though unicast reliable protocols, such as TCP, can be adopted to implement data transmission toward multiple receivers, multicast protocols are becoming an efficient alternative. However, differently from multimedia distributed systems, which tolerate unreliable data streaming, Grids often require reliable multicast protocols to deliver data without losses and errors. In this paper, we discuss a suite of reliable multicast protocols for providing middleware platforms for hierarchical grid systems with collective communication and we show a preliminary performance evaluation that compares different reliable multicast schemes.