Designing General, Composable, and Middleware-independent Grid Infrastructure Tools for Multi-tiered Job Management

We propose a multi-tiered architecture for middleware-independent Grid job management. The architecture consists of a number of services for well-defined tasks in the job management process, offering complete user-level isolation of service capabilities, multiple layers of abstraction, control, and fault tolerance. The middleware abstraction layer comprises components for targeted job submission, job control and resource discovery. The brokered job submission layer offers a Grid view on resources, including functionality for resource brokering and submission of jobs to selected resources. The reliable job submission layer includes components for fault tolerant execution of individual jobs and groups of independent jobs, respectively. The architecture is proposed as a composable set of tools rather than a monolithic solution, allowing users to select the individual components of interest. The prototype presented is implemented using the Globus Toolkit 4, integrated with the Globus Toolkit 4 and NorduGrid/ARC middlewares and based on existing and emerging Grid standards. A performance evaluation reveals that the overhead for resource discovery, brokering, middleware-specific format conversions, job monitoring, fault tolerance, and management of individual and groups of jobs is sufficiently small to motivate the use of the framework.