A black-box approach to performance analysis of grid middleware

Abstract

We propose a black-box approach to performance analysis of grid middleware and present the architecture of a non-invasive platform-independent evaluation tool that quantifies the effects of the overhead imposed by grid middleware on both the throughput of the system and on the turnaround times of grid applications. This approach is a step towards producing a middleware independent, comparable, reproducible and fair performance analysis of grid middlewares. The result of such performance analysis can be used by system administrators to tune the system configuration and by developers to find the bottlenecks and problems in their design and implementation of the system. It can also be used to devise more optimized usage patterns. As a proof of concept, we describe the implementation details of the evaluation tool for UNICORE 5 and demonstrate the result of initial experiments. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.