Understanding Grid resource information management through a synthetic database benchmark/workload

Management of Grid resource information is a challenging, and important area considering the potential size of the Grid and wide range of resources that should be represented. Though example Grid Information Servers exist, behavior of these servers across different platforms is less well understood. This paper describes a study we undertook to compare the access language and platform capabilities for three different database platforms, relational, native XML, and LDAP, serving as a Grid information server. Our study measures query response times for a range of queries and highlights sensitivities exhibited by the different platforms to variables such as result set size and collection size.