Towards ServMark, an Architecture for Testing Grid Services

Technical University of Delft - Technical Report ServMark-2006-002, July 2006Grid computing provides a natural way to aggregate resources from different administrative domains for building large scale distributed environments. The Web Services paradigm proposes a way by which virtual services can be seamlessly integrated into global-scale solutions to complex problems. While the usage of Grid technology ranges from academia and research to business world and production, two issues must be considered: that the promised functionality can be accurately quantified and that the performance can be evaluated based on well defined means. Without adequate functionality demonstrators, systems cannot be tuned or adequately configured, and Web services cannot be stressed adequately in production environment. Without performance evaluation systems, the system design and procurement processes are limp, and the performance of Web Services in production cannot be assessed. In this paper, we present ServMark, a carefully researched tool for Grid performance evaluation. While we acknowledge that a lot of ground must be covered to fulfill the requirements of a system for testing Grid environments, and Web (and Grid) Services, we believe that ServMark addresses the minimal set of critical issues