GridARM: Askalon's Grid Resource Management System
The emergence of Grid computing has accentuated the need of an adaptable, scalable and extensible resource management system. A system, tightly coupled with some technology, may easily become obsolete with the change in technology, especially when we know that the underlying technology is continuously evolving. We are working on a new Grid resource management system called GridARM (Askalon's Grid Resource Management system). The GridARM system render the boundaries of resource brokerage, Virtual Organization (VO) wide authorization and advanced reservation, and to provide a scalable Grid resource management as a middleware infrastructure.
A work in progress, GridARM (Grid Askalon Resource Management) System is based on a new architecture for Grid resource management, resource control and resource provisioning across sites and administrative domains. It provides resource matching and resource brokerage based on state-of-the-art resource description and discovery mechanism which is not available in existing GRM systems. The brokerage process which was manual or semi-manual in existing systems, is automated in the GridARM. This automation is necessary not only because of its usability, efficiency and low cost but also because user don't have to spend time in making selection between alternative choices. Also GridARM system provides fine-grained VO-wide authorization and user profiling mechanism which results in reduced involvement of local site administrators and even user itself. It will provide a distributed and replicate able advanced reservation and co allocation mechanism in which VO-wide authorization and ticket verification is performed and negotiation between a potential client and resource provider is possible.
The GridARM system consists of WSRD-complaint Grid services like discovery, broker,
reservation service etc.
These services are persistent and can be deployed manually or
dynamically on different distributed GridARM-enabled hosts. Migration
of these services is also possible in case of failure.
GridARM is part of the ASKALON
Grid application development environment and has been deployed in DPSGrid and
ZIDGrid.
For Installation and Usage see here.
GLARE: A Grid Activity Registration, Deployment and Provisioning Framework
The initial GridARM implementation focuses mainly on physical resources, but logical Grid resources like application components, Grid workflow activities are also the assential counterparts of the Grid. Therefore, it was required to extend the GridARM to cover logical resources as well. The extension focus on the important constituents of the Grid workflow application components called activities. We have designed and implemented a Grid activity registration, deployment and provisioning framework which handles dynamic registration, automatic deployment and and on-demand provision of software components. We separately provide registry services for component types (abstract descriptions) and actual deployed software. Application developer provides abstract description of application components in the Grid workflow application, which then mapped at runtime to actually deployed components. This mechanism shields the Grid from workflow application developers. See more details about GLARE deployment, configuration and usage Here
We have developed a graphical client application that can be used
to browse available resources and register/unregister and
deploy/undeploy activity deployments.
See demo video
Currently we are working on the semantic enhancement of our system with ontologies. Out next focus is on the provision of negotiation based advanced reservation of the Grid resources including both physical as well as logical resources.
