Hosting Services on the Grid: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

In this paper, we present the challenges to service hosting on the Grid using a measurement study on a prototype Grid testbed. For this experimental study, we have deployed the bioinformatics service BLAST from NCBI on PlanetLab, a set of widely distributed nodes, managed by the BOINC middleware. Our results indicate that the stateless nature of BOINC presents three major challenges to service hosting on the Grid: the need to deal with substantial computation and communication heterogeneity, the need to handle tight data and computation coupling, and the necessity for handling distinct response-sensitive service requests. We present experimental results that illuminate these challenges and discuss possible remedies to make Grids viable for hosting emerging services.