Monitoring the connectivity of a grid

Grid computing is a new paradigm that enables the distributed coordination of resources and services which are geographically dispersed, span multiple trust domains and are heterogeneous. Network infrastructure monitoring, while vital for activities such as service selection, exhibits inherent scalability problems: in principle, in a Grid composed of <i>n</i> resources, we need to keep record of <i>n</i>² end-to-end paths. We introduce an approach to network monitoring that takes into account scalability: a Grid is partitioned into domains, and network monitoring is limited to the measurement of domain-to-domain connectivity. However, partitions must be consistent with network performance, since we expect that an observed network performance between domains is representative of the performance between the Grid Services included into domains.