GridBench: A tool for the interactive performance exploration of Grid infrastructures

As Grids rapidly expand in size and complexity, the task of benchmarking and testing, interactive or unattended, quickly becomes unmanageable. In this article we describe the difficulties of testing/benchmarking resources in large Grid infrastructures and we present the software architecture implementation of GridBench, an extensible tool for testing, benchmarking and ranking of Grid resources. We give an overview of GridBench services and tools, which support the easy definition, invocation and management of tests and benchmarking experiments. We also show how the tool can be used in the analysis of benchmarking results and how the measurements can be used to complement the information provided by Grid Information Services and used as a basis for resource selection and user-driven resource ranking. In order to illustrate the usage of the tool, we describe scenarios for using the GridBench framework to perform test/benchmark experiments and analyze the results.