The design of a performance steering system for component-based grid applications

A major method of constructing applications to run on a computational Grid is to assemble them from components-separately deployable units of computation of well-defined functionality. Performance steering is an adaptive process involving run-time adjustment of factors affecting the performance of an application. This paper presents a design for a system capable of steering, towards a minimum run-time, the performance of a component-based application executing in a distributed fashion on a computational Grid. The proposed performance steering system controls the performance of single applications, and the basic design seeks to separate application-level and component-level concerns. The existence of a middleware resource scheduler external to the performance steering system is assumed, and potential problems are discussed. A possible model of operation is given in terms of application and component execution phases. The need for performance prediction capability, and for repositories of application-specific and component-specific performance information, is discussed. An initial implementation is briefly described.