Benchmarking the OGSA-DAI Middleware

One important contribution to the community that is developing Grid middleware is the definition and implementation of benchmarks and tools to assess the performance and dependability of Grid applications and the corresponding middleware. In this paper, we present an experimental study that was conducted with OGSA-DAI, a popular package of middleware that provides access to remote data resources thought a unified Web-service front-end. The results show that OGSA-DAI is quite stable and performed quite well in scalability tests, executed on Grid5000. However, we also demonstrate that OGSA-DAI WSI is currently using a SOAP container (Apache Axis1.2.1) that suffers from severe memory leaks. We show how the default configuration of OGSA-DAI is not affected by that problem, but a small change in the configuration of a Web-service may lead to very unreliable execution of OGSA-DAI. This research work is carried out under the FP6 Network of Excellence CoreGRID funded by the European Commission (Contract IST-2002004265).