How to Build Utility Computing Infrastructures with Globus

This is a guest post by Ignacio Martín Llorente, Professor of Distributed Systems Architectures at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

While research institutions are interested in Partner Grids that provide access to a higher computing performance to satisfy peak demands and support to face collaborative projects; enterprises understand grid computing as a way to address the changing service needs in an organization. They are interested in in-house resource sharing, to achieve a better return from their information technology investment, supplemented by outsourced resources, to satisfy peak or unusual demands. An Outsourced/Utility Grid would provide pay-per-use computational power when Enterprise Grid resources are overloaded. Such hierarchical grid organization may be extended recursively to federate a higher number of Partner or Outsourced Grid infrastructures with consumer/provider relationships. This would allow supplying resources on demand, making resource provision more agile and adaptive. It would offer, therefore, access to a potentially unlimited computational capacity, causing IT costs to transform from fixed to variable.

In the context of the GridWay project we have developed a Grid Gateway that exposes a WSRF interface to a metascheduling instance, so enabling the creation of hierarchical grid structures. GridGateWay consists of a set of Globus services hosting a GridWay Metascheduler, thus providing a uniform, standard interface for the secure and reliable submission, monitoring and control of jobs. Most functionality is provided through GRAM (Grid Resource Allocation and Management), while scheduling information is provided through MDS (Monitoring and Discovery Service). The security requirement at the user level is addressed by GSI (Globus Security Infrastructure).

The new technology allows different layers of metaschedulers to be arranged in a hierarchical structure. In this arrangement, each target grid is handled as another resource, that is, the underlying grid is characterized as a single resource in the source grid, by means of grid gateways. This strategy encourages companies to federate their grids in order to have a better return of IT investment, and also satisfy peak demands of computation. Furthermore, this solution allows for gradual deployment (from fully in-house to fully outsourced), in order to deal with the obstacles for grid technology adoption, such as enterprise scepticism and IT staff resistance.

This approach also provides the components required for interoperability between existing Grid infrastructures. It is clear that we can’t wait for a single global grid to arise or to become predominant. Instead, we should work to build a seamless integration of the existing grids, which may eventually constitute the ultimate, capital-letter Grid, Grid of grids, or InterGrid, in the same way that the Internet was born. Grid interoperability can be achieved by means of common, ideally standard, grid interfaces, whose existence is an important (if not essential) characteristic of grid systems. Unfortunately, common interfaces (and even less standard ones) are not always available for given services. Then, the use of grid adapters and gateways becomes necessary. In particular, an interoperability solution based on grid gateways provides the infrastructures with significant benefits in terms of autonomy, scalability, deployment and security.

Well, what are you waiting for?, components are open-source, license is Apache v2.0, and we are willing to collaborate with you.