NAS Grid Benchmarks: a tool for Grid space exploration

We present a benchmark suite for computational grids in this paper. It is based on the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) and is called the NAS Grid Benchmark (NGB). We present NGB as a data flow graph encapsulating an instance of an NPB code in each graph node, which communicates with other nodes by sending/receiving initialization data. These nodes may be mapped to the same or different Grid machines. Like NPB, NGB specifies several different classes (problem sizes). NGB also specifies the generic Grid services that are sufficient for running the suite. The implementor has the freedom to choose any Grid environment. We describe a reference implementation in Java and present some scenarios for using NGB.