On the Influence of Network Characteristics on Application Performance in the Grid Environment

Abstract

In the Grid computing, it is a key issue how limited network resources are effectively shared by communications of various applications in order to improve the application-level performance, e.g., to reduce the completion time of each application and/or a set of applications. In fact, the communication of an application changes the condition of network resources, which may, in turn, affect the communications in other applications, and thus may deteriorate their performance. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of traffic generated by some typical grid applications, and how the round-trip time and the bottleneck bandwidth affect the application-level performance (i.e., completion time) of these applications. Our experiments show that the impact of network conditions on the application performance and the impact of application traffic on the network conditions are considerably different depending on the application. Those results suggest an effective network resource allocation should take network-related properties of individual applications into consideration.