Information Representation on the Grid : a Synthetic Database Benchmark / Workload for Grid Information Servers

The Grid is a new paradigm for wide area distributed computing. Management of grid resource information on the grid is complicated by the fact that grid resources such as hosts, clusters, virtual organizations, people, mathematical libraries, software packages, and services have aspects of their description that change at millisecond rates. This defining characteristic makes traditional directory service solutions inappropriate. Our work contributes to the understanding of resource information representation and retrieval in grid computing through the development of a grid-specific synthetic database benchmark/workload for a grid resource information repository, and the application of the benchmark/workload to three platforms. The benchmark/workload is a set of queries and ’scenarios’ developed from a platform-neutral data model of grid resources. The contribution of our work is threefold: the first is a synthetic database benchmark/workload. The queries are meaningful in a grid context, assume an underlying data model made up of realistic grid resources, and populated with realistic data. The second is the application of the database benchmark on three vastly heterogeneous “database” platforms: mySQL 4.0, a relational database, that uses the SQL query language; Xindice 1.1, a native XML database that uses XPath as its query language; and MDS2, an LDAP database that uses LDAP as its query language. The final contribution is a metric that captures both tangible and less tangible aspects of information retrieval.