Designing a Resource Broker for Heterogeneous Grids

TL;DR

This paper introduces the design of Gridbus, a resource broker that simplifies application deployment on heterogeneous grid environments by providing flexible interfaces and supporting various middleware.

Contribution

It presents a novel resource broker architecture that enhances flexibility and extensibility for heterogeneous grid resource management.

Findings

The broker supports multiple middleware platforms.

It accommodates diverse user objectives and interfaces.

Lessons learned from implementation are discussed.

Abstract

Grids provide uniform access to aggregations of heterogeneous resources and services such as computers, networks and storage owned by multiple organizations. However, such a dynamic environment poses many challenges for application composition and deployment. In this paper, we present the design of the Gridbus Grid resource broker that allows users to create applications and specify different objectives through different interfaces without having to deal with the complexity of Grid infrastructure. We present the unique requirements that motivated our design and discuss how these provide flexibility in extending the functionality of the broker to support different low-level middlewares and user interfaces. We evaluate the broker with different job profiles and Grid middleware and conclude with the lessons learnt from our development experience.