Service Oriented Grid Resource Modeling and Management

Computational grids (CGs) are large scale networks of geographically distributed aggregates of resource clusters that may be contributed by distinct providers. The exploitation of these resources is enabled by a collection of decision-making processes; including resource management and discovery, resource state dissemination, and job scheduling. Traditionally, these mechanisms rely on a physical view of the grid resource model. This entails the need for complex multi-dimensional search strategies and a considerable level of resource state information exchange between the grid management domains. Consequently, it has been difficult to achieve the desirable performance properties of speed, robustness and scalability required for the management of CGs. In this paper we argue that with the adoption of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a logical service-oriented view of the resource model provides the necessary level of abstraction to express the grid capacity to handle the load of hosted services. In this respect, we propose a Service Oriented Model (SOM) that relies on the quantification of the aggregated resource behaviour using a defined service capacity unit that we call servslot. The paper details the development of SOM and highlights the pertinent issues that arise from this new approach. A preliminary exploration of SOM integration as part of a nominal grid architectural framework is provided along with directions for future works.