Obtaining Performance Measures through Microbenchmarking in a Peer-to-Peer Overlay Computer

The availability of enormous amounts of unused computing power and data storage over the Internet makes the development of a globally distributed computing platform, called Overlay Computer (OC), attractive for the industry, the scientific community, and also the general user. In order to be effective, an OC must be equipped with tools for estimating and optimizing the performance of applications. The tools must rely upon performance metrics of the key factors impacting performance of a distributed application, such as interconnection latency and bandwidth, and available computing power at the nodes. This paper first reviews the state-of-the-art on performance benchmarking approaches in globally distributed systems, including performance- conscious P2P systems. Later, it addresses the problem of developing a suite of microbenchmarking experiments aimed at providing the basic functionalities of a measurement tool for a P2P-based OC platform. Results show that such a measuring system should take into account the communication patterns generated by the applications in order to provide useful performance insights.