Abstract
In order to achieve a reasonable degree of performance and reliability, Metascheduling has been revealed as a key functionality of the grid middleware. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis between two major grid scheduling philosophies: a semi-centralized approach, represented by the EGEE Workload Management System, and a fully distributed approach, represented by the Grid Way Metascheduler. The distributed approach follow a loosely-coupled philosophy for the Grid resembling the end-to-end principle, which has fostered the spectacular development and diffusion of the Internet and, in particular, Web technologies in the past decade. The comparative is both theoretical, through a functionality checklist, and experimental, through the execution of a fusion physics plasma application on the EGEE infrastructure. This paper not only includes a standard analysis with the obtained times, but also a complex analysis based on a performance model.