Generic support for bulk operations in grid applications

Within grid environments, latencies for remote operations of any kind can, as the number of operations increases, become a dominant factor for overall application performance. Amongst various approaches for latency hiding, bulk operations provide one possible solution to reduce latencies for large numbers of similar operations. The identification of bulks can, however, pose a non-trivial exercise for application developers, often requiring changes to the implemented remote API, and hence direct code modifications to the application themselves.In this paper we show how bulk operations can be integrated into existing API implementations, and identify the required properties of the API to make this approach feasible. We also show that our approach considers any type of bulk operation, and is independent of the underlying middleware support for bulks. We further describe a prototype implementation (within the SAGA C++ reference implementation effort), and present performance measurements for bulks of remote file copy operations.