Grid computing accounting and statistics management system

A system for managing a grid computing environment comprising:

• a plurality of heterogenous and distributed data processing resources, wherein respective ones of said data processing resources include a plurality of platforms having different implementations, semantic behaviors and application programming interfaces and which may exhibit different performance for a given portion of a given job;
• a grid management system including a grid workload agent to monitor respective ones of said data processing resources of said grid computing environment processing job portions of data processing requests, wherein said job portions have particular characteristics;
• content-addressable storage means for periodically storing data records forming a snapshot of current instantaneous operations of individual application environments in said grid computing environment which include, in correspondence with a plurality of characteristics of a respective job portion, performance data from respective resources monitored by said grid workload agent, wherein said plurality of characteristics include nature of processing being performed, said platform on which said processing is performed during said instantaneous operation, said resource or resources on which said processing is performed and concurrent processing in said grid environment, said performance data including data identifying a corresponding monitored respective resource while that resource is processing a respective one of said job portions of data processing requests in correspondence with said characteristic of a respective one of said job portions such that any performance data or other parameter of said data records for respective ones of said resources may be retrieved based on any other performance data or parameter of said data records or logical combination thereof with arbitrarily fine granularity to closely match characteristics of job portions of any other job to assess impact of said other job on said grid environment, determine allocation of said data processing resources to said portions of said other job or predict performance of said other job as performed on available ones of said data processing resources;
• a memory for storing actual performance and predicted performance of said other job as performed by ones of said data processing resources allocated to said other job:
• a content-addressable memory for retrieving said actual performance data on the basis of a said characteristic or combination of said characteristics, and processing data stored by said content-addressable memory to form processed performance data;
• and
• at least one module cooperating with said grid workload agent to manage said grid computing environment based on said processed performance data.