Design and implementation of a readily available historical Application Performance Database (AppDB) for grid

Performance of any one application is more often than not very intimately related to the hardware and software characteristics of a resource the application is being executed on, as well as the use of application parameters during job instantiation. As a result, execution of applications and associated user jobs in heterogeneous grid environments exhibit heterogeneous performance. Users perceive this heterogeneity through inconsistent job execution times and cost. In order to understand, and possibly, eliminate such inconsistencies, grid schedulers and/or users must be aware of the existing application and resource relationships. This paper presents a tool that addresses this application-resource relationship issue by providing insight into past application performance across various resources. The tool named Application Performance Database (AppDB) is a standalone, dedicated application that stores all aspects of a job being executed for later retrieval, comparison, and analysis. Access to AppDB is realized through a web-service based API or a web interface.