CAMPUS GRIDS: A FRAME WORK TO FACILITATE RESOURCE SHARING

It is common at research institutions to maintain multiple clusters. These might fulfill different needs and policies, or represent different owners or generations of hardware. Many of these clusters are under utilized while researchers at other departments may require these resources. This may be solved by linking clusters with grid mid-dleware. This thesis describes a distributed high throughput computing framework to link clusters without changing security or execution environments. The framework initially keeps jobs local to the submitter, overflowing if necessary to the campus, and regional grid. The framework is implemented spanning two campuses at the Holland Computing Center. We evaluate the framework for five characteristics of campus grids. This framework is then further expanded to bridge campus grids into a regional grid, and overflow to national cyberinfrastructure. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, David Swanson. I appreciated his guidance and patience while I implemented this thesis project. Also, I thank David for hiring me as an freshman, with little computing experience and giving me the support to learn and excel at scientific computing. I want to thank Dan Fraser for bringing this interesting project to me and giving me the opportunity to create my own solution to this problem. I want to thank Brian Bockelman for excellent technical advise during my time at HCC. He worked diligently with me on my thesis. I also want to thank all the people at the Holland Computing Center. I have broken their systems, asked for advise, and caused an untold amount of extra work for them. I especially want to thank my colleagues for the assistance they've provided over the years: