Design, Implementation and Performance Evaluation of GridRPC Programming Middleware for a Large-Scale Computational Grid

Abstract

This paper reports on the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a suite of GridRPC programming middleware called Ninf-G Version 2 (Ninf-G2). Ninf-G2 is a reference implementation of the GridRPC API, a proposed GGF standard. Ninf-G2 has been designed so that it provides 1) high performance in a large-scale computational Grid, 2) the rich functionalities which are required to adapt to compensate for the heterogeneity and unreliability of a Grid environment, and 3) an API which supports easy development and execution of Grid applications. Ninf-G2 is implemented to work with basic Grid services, such as GSI, GRAM, and MDS in the Globus Toolkit version 2. The performance ofNinf-G2 was evaluated using a weather forecasting system which was developed using Ninf-G2. The experimental results indicate that high performance can be attained even in relatively fine-grained task-parallel applications on hundreds of processors in a Grid environment.