Legacy Code Support for Commercial Production Grids

Currently several production Grids offer their resources for academic communities. Access to these Grids is free but restricted to academic users. As so, the Grids offer only basic quality of service guarantees and minimal user support. This incorporates Grid portals without workflow editing and execution capabilities, brokering with no QoS and SLA management, security solutions without privacy and trust management. Today’s Grids do not provide any kind of support for running legacy code applications, and do only very basic accounting without any billing functionalities. This academic experimental phase should be followed by opening up the Grid to non-academic communities, such as business and industry. The widening of the Grid user community defines additional requirements. This paper discusses how the GEMLCA legacy code architecture is extended in order to fulfil the requirements of commercial production Grids. The aim of our research is to facilitate the seamless integration of GEMLCA into future commercial Grids. GEMLCA, in this way, could serve as a reference implementation for any third party utility service that can be added to production Grids in order to improve their usability.