Characterization of Computational Grid Resources Using Low-level Benchmarks

An important factor that needs to be taken into account by end-users and systems (schedulers, resource brokers, policy brokers) when mapping applications to the Grid, is the performance capacity of hardware resources attached to the Grid and made available through its Virtual Organizations (VOs). In this paper, we examine the problem of characterizing the performance capacity of Grid resources using benchmarking. We examine the conditions under which such characterization experiments can be implemented in a Grid setting and present the challenges that arise in this context. We specify a small number of performance metrics and propose a suite of micro-benchmarks to estimate these metrics for clusters that belong to large Virtual Organizations. We describe GridBench, a tool developed to administer benchmarking experiments, publish their results, and produce graphical representations of their metrics. We describe benchmarking experiments conducted with, and published through GridBench, and show how they can help end-users assess the performance capacity of resources that belong to a target Virtual Organization. Finally, we examine the advantages of this approach over solutions implemented currently in existing Grid infrastructures. We conclude that it is essential to provide benchmarking services in the Grid infrastructure, in order to enable the attachment of performance-related metadata to resources belonging to Virtual Organizations and the retrieval of such metadata by end-users and other Grid systems.