Improving GridWay with network information: Tuning the monitoring tool

The aggregation of heterogeneous and geographically distributed resources for new science and engineering applications has been made possible thanks to the deployment of Grid technologies. These systems have communication network requirements which should be taken into account when performing usual tasks such as scheduling, migrating or monitoring of jobs. Recall the network should be used in an efficient and fault-tolerant way since the users, services, and data use it to communicate with each other. However, most of the existing efforts to provide QoS in Grids do not take network issues into account, and focus instead on processor workload and disk access. Authors have previously proposed a proof-of-concept implementation of a network-aware metascheduler, developed as an extension to GridWay. This extension harnesses network information to perform scheduling tasks. In this work, a tuning of the network monitoring tool is presented and evaluated. Results show that the overhead caused by this monitoring tool varies depending on the monitoring parameters, and these ones, in turn, depend on the actual Grid environment.