An OGSI-compliant Grid Information Service - Its architecture and performance study

The Information Service is a key component of a Grid environment and critical to the operation of a computational Grid. This paper presents an Information Service that complies with the OGSI (Open Grid Services Infrastructure) framework. This Information Service is a hierarchical structure which consists of the Virtual Organization level, site level and node level. We propose two models of information data organization for the Information Service, i.e. source-data based model and meta-data based model. Two sets of experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the Information Service. The experimental results show that the amount of data communicated between clients and the Information Service, and among the component services is the key factor to influence the scalability of the Information Service. We also found that the meta-data based model is an effective solution to improve the scalability of the Information Service.