Neo, “Performance evaluation in computational grid environments

Grid computing has been developed extensive in re-cently years and is becoming an important platform for high performance computing in scientific areas. Grid performance evaluation is an important approach to im-prove the performance of Grid systems and applications. However, few work has been conducted in grid perfor-mance evaluation due to a lot of reasons like lack of ap-propriate grid performance metrics, complexity of the grids, etc. In this paper, we analyze the performance metrics like response time and system utilization in the computa-tional grid environment. We argue that instead of calcu-lating the system utilization in the traditional, a concept of relative grid utilization, which describes how close is a single grid application performance to the perfor-mance of the same application submitted without grid middleware. We also discuss the utilization for the grid systems processing a number of jobs. In our experi-ments, we use NPB/NGB to evaluate the APSTC cluster grid and NTU Campus Grid performance, especially the overhead of SGE and Globus. Our results show that the overhead of grid middleware turns to be ignorable when the job size grows, and the characteristics of the grid applications affect a lot on utilization of computational grids