Policy-based active Grid management architecture

Due to the large scale of Grid environment and its rapid expansion, both in Grid resources and Grid network environment, it is getting more imperative to provide a Grid management mechanism that can enable Grid Computing to adapt to various application requirements in a flexible and automated way. This paper proposes to introduce policy-based management, enhanced by active network, to cope with this challenging requirement. Based on the analysis and comparison of three typical Grid architectures, this paper firstly presents a new view of Grid architecture that emphasizes the policy-based Grid management middleware and active network middleware. Then detailed design of these two middleware is discussed. A case study for controlled and secure massive storage access exemplifies this policy-based active Grid management architecture and shows that an improvement in manageability, automation and flexibility of Grid system can be achieved.