Performance characterization of heterogeneous distributed commodity cluster resources

While distributed computing systems which generally involve the aggregation of geographically distributed heterogeneous resources can in principle be used as computing platform, in practice, the discovery and selection of quality resources that satisfy user´s application requirements remain an issue that is difficult to address. In this paper, we represent the performance of a computational cluster as a regression model that can be used to fine-tune the selection of suitable cluster resources. A study on the performance of distributed systems with respect to particular variations in parameters is presented. Our objective is to use a measurement-based evaluation technique to characterize the specific performance contribution of the individual cluster resource configurations. In the process we identify the key primary parameters (or factors) that should be considered when selecting and allocating a computational node for user application execution.