Towards SLA-Supported Resource Management

Achievements and experiences in projects with focus on resource management have shown that the goals and needs of High Performance Computing service providers have not or only inadequately been taken into account in Grid research and development. Mapping real-life business behaviour and workflows within the service provider domain to the electronic level implies focusing on the business rules of the provider as well as on the complexity of the jobs and the current state of the HPC system. This paper describes an architectural approach towards a business-oriented and Service Level Agreement-supported resource management, valuable for High Performance Computing providers to offer and sell their services. With the introduction of a Conversion Factory the authors present a component that is able to combine the Service Level Agreement, the system status, and all business objectives of the provider in order to address the business needs of service providers in the Grid.