Enabling network-aware applications

Many high performance distributed applications use only a small fraction of their available bandwidth. A common cause of this problem is not a flaw in the application design, but rather improperly tuned network settings. Proper tuning techniques, such as setting the correct TCP buffers and using parallel streams, are well known in the net-working community, but outside the networking community they are infrequently applied. In this paper, we describe a service that makes the task of network tuning trivial for application developers and users. Widespread use of this service should virtually eliminate a common stumbling block for high performance distributed applications.