Division of Labor : Tools for Growth and Scalability of Grids

To enable Grid scalability and growth, a usage model has evolved where resource providers make resources available not to individual users directly, but rather to larger units, called virtual organizations (VOs). This enables the resource provider to focus on the dynamics of providing resources to the VOs while VOs specialize to provide resources to their users. Achieving such division of labor requires tools and mechanisms that would allow a resource provider to reliably delegate the usage of a specific resource quantum in such a way that it is unimpacted by other activities that the resource provider participates in. In this paper, we argue that the virtual workspace abstraction provides mechanisms needed to create and manage such environments. Next, we present extensions to the Workspace Service based on the Globus Toolkit 4, and describe an implementation of workspace enforcement using the Xen virtual machine and Linux networking tools. Finally, we use this implementation to demonstrate how workspaces can be used by the resource provider to allocate resources to VO-specific infrastructure services called Edge Services.