Managing Service-Oriented Grids: Experiences from VEGA System Software

Recent work towards a standard based, service oriented Grid represents the convergence of distributed computing technologies from e-Science and e-Commerce communities. A global service management system in such context is required to achieve efficient resource sharing and collaborative service provisioning. This paper presents VEGA system software, a novel grid platform that combines experiences from operating system design and current IP networks. VEGA is distinguished by its two design principles: a) ease of use. By service virtualization, VEGA provides users such a location-independent way to access services that grid applications could transparently benefit from systematic load balancing and error recovery. b) ease of deployment. The architecture of VEGA is fully decentralized without sacrificing efficiency, thanks to the mechanism of resource routing. The concept of grid adapters is developed to make joining and accessing the Grid a ‘plug-and-play’ process. VEGA has been implemented on Web Service platforms and all its components are OGSI-compliant services. To evaluate the overhead and performance of VEGA, we conducted experiments of two categories of benchmark set in a real size Grid environment. The results have shown that VEGA provides an efficient service discovery and selection framework with a reasonable overhead.