A Case Study on Grid Performance Modeling

The purpose of this case study is to develop a performance model for an enterprise grid for performance management and capacity planning1. The target environment includes grid applications such as health-care and financial services where the data is located primarily within the resources of a worldwide corporation. The approach is to build a discrete event simulation model for a representative work-flow grid. Five work-flow classes, found using a customized k-means clustering algorithm characterize the workload of the grid. Analyzing the gap between the simulation and measurement data validates the model. The case study demonstrates that the simulation model can be used to predict the grid system performance given a workload forecast. The model is also used to evaluate alternative scheduling strategies. The simulation model is flexible and easily incorporates several system details