Performance Oriented Development and Tuning of GRID Applications Emilio Mancini 1 , Massimiliano Rak 2 , Roberto Torella 2 , and Umberto Villano 1 1 Universit´ a del Sannio, Facolt´ a di Ingegneria C.so Garibaldi 107, 82100 Benevento, Italy {epmancini,villano}@unisannio.it 2 DII, Seconda Universit´ a di Napoli via Roma 29, 81031 Aversa(CE), Italy {massimiliano.rak,r.torella}@unina2.it Abstract. GRID Application development is a hard task. Good applications should correctly use large distributed systems, whose infrastructure heavily af- fects the application performance. In this paper we propose a performance oriented approach to GRID application development, founded on the use of a prototype language (MetaPL) for the description of the applications and the use of a hetero- geneous system simulation environment (HeSSE) for performance prediction. We developed GRID simulation components for the existing simulation environment (HeSSE) and validated them. After that we extended the MetaPL language in order to explicitly support GRID application features and simulated a simple case study to show how the approach works. 1 Introduction The presence of distributed software systems is pervasive in current computing appli- cations. In commercial and business environments, the majority of time-critical appli- cations has moved from mainframe platforms to distributed systems. In academic and research fields, the advances in high-speed networks and improved microprocessor per- formance have made clusters or networks of workstations and Computational GRIDS an appealing vehicle for cost-effective parallel computing. However, the systematic use of distributed programming can be frustrating, especially if the final application per- formance is more than an issue. Even if great effort has been putting in developing methodologies and tools that could help the final programmer to develop application independently from the underlying architecture, as happen in GRID environment, very few results have been obtained to support prediction and evaluation of prototypal ap- plication. In the last few years, our research group has been active in the performance analysis and prediction field, developing HeSSE [6-7], a simulator of distributed ap- plications executed in heterogeneous systems, and MetaPL a prototypal-base language, based on XML, able to support many different programming paradigm. This paper presents a simulation-based methodology, founded on HeSSE and MetaPL, that makes it possible to predict GRID application and system performance, even when the execu- tion environment is not available and the application is not completely developed. This J. Dongarra, K. Madsen, and J. Wa´ sniewski (Eds.): PARA 2004, LNCS 3732, pp. 509–518, 2006. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006