The Grid paradigm implies the sharing of a variety of resources across multiple administrative domains. In order to execute a work-flow using these distributed resources an instrument is needed to co-allocate resources by reaching agreements with the different local scheduling systems involved. Apart from compute resources to execute the work-flow the co-ordinated usage of other resource types must be also guaranteed, as there are for example a network connectivity with dedicated QoS parameters or a visualisation device. We present a Web Service-based MetaScheduling Service which allows to negotiate a common time slot with local resource management systems to enable the execution of a distributed work-flow. The successful negotiation process results in a formal agreement based on the WS-Agreement recommendation that is currently specified by the GRAAP working group of the Global Grid Forum. As a use case we demonstrate the integration of this MetaScheduling Service into the UNICORE middleware. a next step we characterise the functionality of the MetaScheduling Service (Section 3), followed by a description of the current implementation. Then, in Section 5, we present the integration of the scheduling system into the UNICORE Grid middleware [1]. The performance of the the whole system is evaluated in Section 6, and the last section contains conclusions and an outlook to future work.
Abstract. The UNICORE Grid-technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed Grid resources. In this paper we present the recent evolution from project results to production Grids. At the beginning UNICORE was developed as a prototype software in two projects funded by the German research ministry (BMBF). Over the following years, in various European-funded projects, UNICORE evolved to a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production at many supercomputing centers worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects, which use existing UNICORE components to implement advanced features, high level services, and support for applications from a growing range of domains. In order to foster these ongoing developments, UNICORE is available as open source under BSD licence at SourceForge, where new releases are published on a regular basis. This paper is a review of the UNICORE achievements so far and gives a glimpse on the UNICORE roadmap.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.