A Performance Contract System in a Grid Enabling, Component Based Programming Environment

In these years, grid computing is probably the most promising approach for building large scale and cost effective applications. However, this very popular approach needs a sophisticated software infrastructure to address several requirements. One of these requirements is the ability to sustain a predictable performance in front to the fluctuations related to the dynamic nature of a grid. In this paper we describe design and realization of a Performance Contract System, a software infrastructure that manages the computational kernel of a grid application with the aim to face such aspect of the grid computing, as well as the strategies and the experiences to integrate it in a gridenabling component-based programming environment still under development.