Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

TL;DR

This paper compares four grid middleware technologies—UNICORE, Globus, Legion, and Gridbus—highlighting their architectures, features, and a custom resource broker implementation for UNICORE to facilitate resource management.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of four major grid middleware systems and introduces a resource broker for UNICORE, addressing a gap in its functionality.

Findings

Globus and Legion have modular architectures.

UNICORE lacks built-in resource brokering, which was implemented separately.

The systems differ significantly in implementation models and features.

Abstract

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.