An evaluation of alternative designs for a grid information service

Computational grids consisting of large and diverse sets of distributed resources have recently been adopted by organizations such as NASA and the NSF. One key component of a computational grid is an information service that provides information about resources, services and applications to users and their tools. This information is required to use a computational grid and therefore should be available in a timely and reliable manner. In this work, we describe the Globus information service, describe how this service is used, analyze its current performance, and perform trace-driven simulations to evaluate alternative implementations of this grid information service. We find that the majority of the transactions with the information service are changes to the data maintained by the service. We also find that of the three servers we evaluate, one of the commercial products provides the best performance for our workload and that the response time of the information service was not improved during the single experiment we performed with data distributed across two servers.