Influence of network characteristics on application performance in a grid environment

In grid computing, a key issue is how limited network resources can be shared by communications by various applications more effectively in order to improve application-level performance, e.g., by reducing the completion time for an individual application and/or set of applications. Communication by an application changes the condition of the network resources, which may, in turn, affect communications by other applications, and thus may degrade their performance. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of traffic generated by typical grid applications, and the effect of the round-trip time and bottleneck bandwidth on the application-level performance (i.e., completion time) of these applications. Our experiments showed that the impact of network conditions on the performance of various applications and the impact of application traffic on network conditions differed considerably depending on the application. These results suggest that effective allocation of network resources must take into account the network-related properties of individual applications.