Overview of a performance evaluation system for global computing scheduling algorithms

While there have been several proposals of high-performance global computing systems, scheduling schemes for the systems have not been well investigated. The reason is difficulties of evaluation by large-scale benchmarks with reproducible results. Our Bricks performance evaluation system allows the analysis and comparison of various scheduling schemes in a typical high-performance global computing setting. Bricks can simulate various behaviors of global computing systems, especially the behavior of networks and resource scheduling algorithms. Moreover, Bricks is partitioned into components such that not only can its constituents be replaced to simulate various different system algorithms, but it also allows the incorporation of existing global computing components via its foreign interface. To test the validity of the latter characteristics, we incorporated the NWS (Network Weather Service) system, which monitors and forecasts global computing systems behavior. Experiments were conducted by running NWS under a real environment versus a Bricks-simulated environment, given the observed parameters of the real environment. We observed that Bricks behaved in the same manner as the real environment, and NWS also behaved similarly, making quite comparative forecasts under both environments.