  Grid environments have recently been developed with low stretch and overheads
that increase with the logarithm of the number of nodes in the system. Getting
and sending data to/from a large numbers of nodes is gaining importance due to
an increasing number of independent data providers and the heterogeneity of the
network/Grid. One of the key challenges is to achieve a balance between low
bandwidth consumption and good reliability. In this paper we present an
implementation of a reliable multicast protocol over a fault tolerant MPI:
MPICHV2. It can provide one way to solve the problem of transferring large
chunks of data between applications running on a grid with limited network
links. We first show that we can achieve similar performance as the MPICH-P4
implementation by using multicast with data compression in a cluster. Next, we
provide a theoretical cluster organization and GRID network architecture to
harness the performance provided by using multicast. Finally, we present the
conclusion and future work.
