Specifying and Processing Co-Reservations in the Grid

Executing complex applications on Grid infrastructures necessitates the guaranteed allocation of multiple resources. Such guarantees are often implemented by means of advance reservations. Reserving resources in advance requires multiple steps – beginning with their description to their actual allocation. In a Grid, a client possesses little knowledge about the future status of resources. Thus, manually specifying successful parameters of a co-reservation is a tedious task. Instead, we propose to parametrize certain reservation characteristics (e.g., the start time) and to let a client define criteria for selecting appropriate values. Then, a Grid reservation service processes such requests by determining the future status of resources and calculating a co-reservation candidate which satisfies the criteria. In this paper, we present the Simple Reservation Language (SRL) for describing the requests, demonstrate the transformation of an example request into an integer program using the Zuse Institute Mathematical Programming Language (ZIMPL) and experimentally evaluate the time needed to find the optimal co-reservation using CPLEX.