A Performance Evaluation of WS-MDS in the Globus Toolkit

The Globus Toolkit® (GT) is the “de facto standard” for grid computing. Measuring the performance of various components of the GT in a wide area network (WAN) as well as a local area network (LAN) is essential in understanding the performance that is to be expected from the GT in a realistic deployment in a distributed and heterogeneous environment where there might be complex interactions between network connectivity and service performance. The focus of this paper is the performance of Monitoring and Discovery System (MDS), an essential GT component that is very likely to be used in a mixed; LAN and WAN environment. We specifically tested the scalability, performance, and fairness of the WS-MDS Index bundled with GT 3.9.5. To drive our empirical evaluation of WS-MDS, we used DiPerF, a DIstributed PERformance testing Framework, whose design was aimed at simplifying and automating service performance evaluation.