Grid News: Gridge Resource Management System
Latest developments in computer grid research in ACGT and the world
New features of Gridge Resource Management System for ACGT
An important component of the ACGT Grid infrastructure is the Gridge Resource Management System (GRMS). GRMS is an open source meta-scheduling system, which allows developers to build and deploy resource management systems for large scale distributed computing infrastructures. GRMS is based on dynamic resource selection, mapping, advanced scheduling technologies and feedback control architecture I order to deal with dynamic Grid environments and resource management challenges such as load-balancing among clusters, remote job control or file staging support.
Therefore, the main goal of the GRMS is to manage the whole process of remote job submission to various batch queuing systems, clusters or resources. It has been designed as an independent core component for resource management processes which can take advantage of various low-level Core Services and existing technologies. GRMS can be considered as a robust system which provides abstraction of the complex grid infrastructure as well as a toolbox which helps to adapt to distributing computing environments.
One of the primary goals of ACGT is the support of standards in all possible grid-related areas. A good example of such a standard is JSDL which will be used for describing ?jobs? for GRMS.
JSDL (Job Submission Description Language) is an extensible XML specification developed by the Global Grid Forum for the description of the structure of the tasks that can be submitted to local scheduling and queuing systems.
JSDL describes the submission aspects of a job, and does not attempt to describe the state of running or historic jobs. Instead, JSDL includes descriptions of properties such as:
- Job name description
- Resource requirements that computers must meet in order to be eligible for scheduling, such as total RAM available, total swap available, CPU clock speed, number of CPUs, Operating System, etc.
- Execution limits, such as the maximum amount of CPU time, wall clock time, or memory that can be consumed.
- File staging, or the transferring of files before or after execution.
- Command to execute, including its command-line arguments, environment variables to define, stdin/stdout/stderr redirection, etc.
In the case of GRMS, JSDL can be used as an alternative to a specialized language describing jobs for GRMS. Even though JSDL is less powerful, it has been adopted by ACGT in order to support groups of users that are already familiar with well known standards that are being used in other environments. This choice also simplifies the cooperation with already existing client applications providing grid submission capabilities.