A Survey-based Study of Grid Traffic

Grid computing offers the prospect of harnessing huge amounts of computational resources. However, it is being argued that such potential cannot be fully exploited due to the nature of the Internet architecture which is not suitable for high-speed communication of large data volumes. In an attempt to find out the accuracy of such description of grid application traffic, we have conducted a survey of Grid applications. Among other things, the survey results have revealed the diversity of Grid traffic, suggesting that there is more to Grid traffic than just transfers of huge bulks. In this paper, we present these results and identify different trends of traffic behavior that have been observed within the results. We then validate our findings by looking in detail at two of the applications that we have surveyed.