A resource management architecture for metacomputing systems

Metacomputing systems are intended to support remote and/or concurrent use of geo- graphically distributed computational resources. Resource management in such systems is complicated by ve concerns that do not typically arise in other situations: site autonomy and heterogeneous substrates at the resources, and application requirements for policy exten- sibility, co-allocation, and online control. We describe a resource management architecture that addresses these concerns. This architecture distributes the resource management prob- lem among distinct local manager, resource broker, and resource co-allocator components, and denes an extensible resource specication language to exchange information about re- quirements. We describe how these techniques have been implemented in the context of the Globus metacomputing toolkit and used to implement a variety of dierent resource man- agement strategies. We report on our experiences applying our techniques in a large testbed, GUSTO, incorporating 15 sites, 330 computers, and 3600 processors.