Adaptive Resource Sharing in a Web Services Environment

One effect of the push towards business process automation and IT consolidation is that low-level resources from multiple administrative domains are shared among multiple workloads and the middleware is called upon to bring about the integration while masking the details of sharing such resources. Web services and grid based technologies hold promise for developing such middleware. However, existing solutions do not extend well when resources to be shared belong to multiple administrative domains and when resource sharing is governed by local policies. In this paper, we describe an architecture for adaptive resource sharing among two types of workloads: (i) local resource specific workload and (ii) global web services based grid workload. Each resource can set its own policies regarding how the resource is to be shared. Our approach leverages both the grid and the web services based technologies and overcomes the limitations of existing solutions by providing an additional layer of middleware. This layer provides services for dynamic discovery and aggregation of resources, policy based and transparent management of resources, and dynamic workload scheduling using the concept of virtualized resources. We discuss some of the design choices we made and present performance results to show the effects of policy-based resource sharing on the throughput delivered to the grid workload.