Prototype Implementation Of A Demand Driven Network Monitoring Architecture

The capability of dynamically monitoring the performance of the communication infrastructure is one of the emerging requirements for a Grid. We claim that such a capability is in fact orthogonal to the more popular collection of data for scheduling and diagnosis, which needs large storage and indexing capabilities, but may disregard real-time performance issues. We discuss such claim analysing the gLite NPM architecture, and we describe a novel network monitoring infrastructure specifically designed for demand driven monitoring, named gd2, that can be potentially integrated in the gLite framework. We describe an implementation of gd2 architecture on a virtual testbed.