Benchmarking the Future: Exploring High-Speed Scientific Data Streaming

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! I’m Ankit Kumar, and although I’m a bit late with this introduction post due to a busy period filled with interviews and college formalities, I’m excited to share my journey with the OSRE 2025 program and the fascinating world of scientific data streaming.

About Me

I’m currently pursuing my BTech degree at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT Delhi) and am based in New Delhi, India. As I approach graduation, I’m thrilled to be working on a project that perfectly aligns with my interests in systems and networking.

My passion for technology has led me through various experiences:

Software Developer at CloudLabs: I worked at a platform founded by Dr. Sumit J Darak that facilitates remote access to actual FPGA boards on a slot basis, making hardware experimentation accessible to students worldwide.
Data Mining Intern at TaskTracker.in: This experience gave me insights into large-scale data processing and analysis.
Undergraduate Researcher: Currently working under Dr. Mukulika Maity on benchmarking QUIC and TCP protocols across different environments including bare metal, virtual machines, and containers.

I chose this OSRE project because it represents an incredible opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the industry at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) while diving deep into cutting-edge networking technologies.

My Project: SciStream Performance Analysis

As part of the SciStream project, I’m focusing on two critical aspects of high-performance scientific data streaming:

1. TCP/UDP Performace Benchmarking

I’m conducting comprehensive benchmarking of SSH and TLS tunnels using various open-source tools and parameters. This work is crucial for understanding how different protocols and their overhead impact the performance of real-time scientific data streaming. The goal is to provide researchers with evidence-based recommendations for moving/processing their high-speed data transfers without compromising performance.

2. QUIC Proxy Exploration

I’m exploring different QUIC proxy implementations to understand their potential advantages over traditional TCP+TLS proxies in scientific workflows. QUIC, the protocol that powers modern web applications like YouTube, offers promising features for scientific data streaming, but comprehensive benchmarking is needed to validate its benefits.

Working with Cutting-Edge Testbeds

Currently, I’m conducting experiments using both the FABRIC testbed and ESnet testbed. These platforms provide access to real high-speed network infrastructure, allowing me to test protocols and configurations under realistic conditions that mirror actual scientific computing environments.

The Team Experience

These past two weeks have been incredibly rewarding, working alongside:

Alain Zhang - my project mate from UC San Diego, cool guy.
Flavio Castro - My project mentor and manager, goto person for my issues. currently at anl as a research development software engineer.
Joaquin Chung - Super mentor, brains behind the project. His guidance on the project is super valubale.
Rajkumar Kettimuthu - Lead Scientist in our project whose comments on our paper critique are invaluable.
Seena Vazifedunn - Graduate Research Assistant at University of Chicago. He asks very relevant and important questions during our report presentation and his feedbacks are very insightful.

The collaborative nature of this project has been fantastic, combining perspectives from different institutions and backgrounds to tackle complex networking challenges.

Stay tuned for updates!

This work is part of the SciStream project at Argonne National Laboratory, reimagining how scientific data moves across modern research infrastructure.

Evaluating congestion controls past and future

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Topics: computer networks, congestion control, reproducibility
Skills: Python, Bash scripting, Linux, computer network performance evaluation
Difficulty: Medium
Size: Large (350 hours)
Mentors: Fraida Fund and Ashutosh Srivastava

Project Idea Description

In computer networks, congestion control protocols play an outsize role in determining our experience with networked applications. New congestion control algorithms are regularly proposed by researchers to improve throughput and latency performance, adapt to new types of networks, and align more closely with the needs of new applications.

However, our understanding of the benefits of a new congestion control protocol depends to a large extent on the evaluation - the network topology, the network delay and throughput, the type of flow, the type of competing traffic - and there is no single standard way to evaluate a congestion control protocol. The Pantheon project (which is no longer supported) sought to fill this gap somewhat and address the problem of reproducibility of congestion control results, but their approach is not easily adapted to evaluation scenarios representative of new types of applications or networks. Nor is it capable of representing the evaluation scenarios in most published results related to congestion control.

The goal of this project, therefore is to create an evaluation suite for congestion control protocols that can be used to reproduce existing congestion control results in the academic literature, and to evaluate new protocols under similar evaluation conditions, and to be easily extended to new scenarios. An “evaluation scenario” includes:

a Python notebook to realize the network topology on the FABRIC and/or Chameleon testbed, and configure the network characteristics,
scripts to generate the data flow(s) needed for the evaluation,
and scripts to capture data from the experiment and visualize the results.

Writing a successful proposal for this project

To write a good proposal for this project, you should review the most influential papers on TCP congestion control, and especially those related to TCP protocols that are available in the Linux kernel.

Use your findings to explain what your proposed evaluation suite will include (what network topologies, what flow generators), and justify this with reference to the academic literature. Also indicate which specific results you expect to be able to reproduce using this suite (e.g. include figures from influential papers showing evaluation results! with citation, of course).

You can also take advantage of existing open source code that reproduces a congestion control result, e.g. Replication: When to Use and When Not to Use BBR, or Some of the Internet may be heading towards BBR dominance: an experimental study.

Github link

There is no pre-existing Git repository for this project - at the beginning of the summer, the contributor will create a new repository for this project.

Project Deliverables

“Packages” of evaluation scenarios that can be used to evaluate a congestion control algorithm implemented in the Linux kernel
Trovi artifacts for realizing each evaluation scenario on Chameleon

FABRIC | UCSC OSPO